


Abandoned Projects

by emwebb17



Category: Supernatural
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-02
Updated: 2017-02-22
Packaged: 2018-01-07 03:32:11
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,544
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1114976
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emwebb17/pseuds/emwebb17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is for archival purposes.  I have quite a few started but never finished fics that I just want to put somewhere other than a flashdrive.  Sadly I can't electronically archive my piles of hand written notes. :(</p>
<p>Each chapter is a different story.  I guess people can read them if they want, but please be aware that most if not all  might never get finished.  Also, some are only a few hundred words--barely more than a lengthy prompt. Ha.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Destiel AU - High School

**Author's Note:**

> This story came from the idea of Jensen and Misha dating when Jensen is very young (Misha is five years older), and then Misha inexplicably disappearing one day. Jensen and Misha run into each other by chance eleven years later on the very night Jensen is proposing to Danneel. I hadn't decided yet if it was going to have a happy ending.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I was going to write a high school AU told in flashbacks, and I still kinda wanna finish this one.
> 
> Dean and Cas dated in high school and then lost touch after graduation. A funeral brings them back to Lawrence, and that triggers memories (the flashbacks) and reminds them that they never stopped loving each other. Things are slightly complicated as they brought their current SOs with them.
> 
> This also has Sam/Ruby as a pairing, but Ruby is not all bad or evil or anything. She is Sam's endgame. It was also going to have some explicit het sex (but only a little) involving them as the POV of the story and the flashbacks would alternate.

October 2013

 

Dean maneuvered Carmen’s year old model Camry right up to the front of his childhood home, rolling up the curb and over his mother’s pansies and nearly swiping the mailbox.  Just for old time’s sake.

“Dean!” Carmen squealed.  “Ignoring my paint job, I don’t think the best first impression I could make on your family is to show up after destroying your parents’ property!”

“What?  It’s not like _you_ did it.  And your paint job is fine.”

“You were two millimeters away from hitting the mailbox.”

Dean shrugged and put the car in park.  “Okay.  Next time _you_ drive twenty hours and I’ll take a snooze in the passenger seat.”

“How about next time _you_ grow a pair of balls and get on a three and a half hour plane ride with me?”

Dean couldn’t decide whether he wanted to scowl or pout, so he was pretty sure his face scrunched into something comical, which was verified by Carmen laughing.  Her ire was completely gone, if one could even call it that.  Carmen was one of those perpetually positive and happy souls that didn’t get angry easily and when she did she managed what Dean often could not: she let it go.  He thought such an upbeat sunshine and kittens person would get on his last nerve, but she calmed him when his nerves were shot.  She was a balm, not an irritant.  And that alone was worth keeping her around.  Add to that the fact that she could cook, knew the proper way to handle vinyl, and gave excellent head—well she was definitely a keeper.  More than that he wasn’t sure about yet.  He liked her.  A lot.  Cared enough that he didn’t step out on her, and subsequently would be hurt if she cheated on him.  But did he love her?  Maybe that was something he should figure out before he introduced her to his parents.  He wondered how she’d react if he just turned around drove twenty hours back to Queens.

He glanced guiltily at Carmen as she reapplied her lipstick using the mirror on the visor.  She deserved better than a commitment-phobe jackass like him.  But he wasn’t ready to give her up just yet.  Or her lasagna.

“I’m really happy to be meeting your family,” she smiled warmly at him as she flipped the visor back up.

He smiled wanly in return.  “Yeah.  I just wish it were under better circumstances.”

Carmen bit her lip looking suddenly worried.  “Is it really okay that I’m here?  I mean, this is very personal for you and I just assumed I would go with you.  But, I didn’t know him and we’ve only been living together now for six months and…” she trailed off, and then said timidly, “I just want to be here for you.”

Dean reached out and took one of her hands, lacing their fingers together.  Carmen settled her other hand on top of his.  “Hey, it means a lot to me that you were willing to drop everything and come out here with me.  Especially for someone who technically isn’t even my family.”  He gave her a real smile.  “I’m glad you’re here.”

She smiled back and Dean could just imagine what a disgusting picture they painted: sitting in the car, holding hands, smiling sappily, having a _moment_.  He dropped her hands and turned the ignition off.  He stared at the Toyota logo on the horn for a few long moments, finally feeling the reality of the reason they were there.  He let out a small sob and bowed his head.  He felt Carmen reach out one hand to rub his back soothingly.  She knew better than to try for a full embrace in this moment; she really was perfect.  He sniffed once, and then let out several more hard sobs before he was able to lift his head and clear his sinuses with a disgusting sounding snort.  He wiped the tears from the corners of his eyes and nodded to himself in the rearview mirror.  It was okay.  He could do this.

By the time they got their luggage out of the trunk and were ringing the front doorbell, Dean had fully composed himself.  He looked to Carmen to give her a reassuring smile.  He didn’t have a family he was embarrassed of, not by a long shot, but the Winchesters were a vocal and opinionated group.  And they often didn’t care if others were present when “discussions” broke out.  He was pretty sure Carmen could hold her own though.  Well, at least she could fade into the background and not get drawn into it.

The door swung open and the beginnings of his smile froze on his face.  He looked down at the cute, petite brunette in front of him.  He made a face.

“Ruby?”

“Dean.  It’s so nice to see you too,” she said dryly.

“Why are you here?”

“Your mother invited me.”

“Why?”

Ruby gave a little shrug and a smug expression settled over her features.  “Guess you’ll have to ask her.”

Dean just continued to scowl at her, so she leaned a little to his right and looked at Carmen.

“Hi.  My name’s Ruby.  You must be Carmen.”

“I am,” she said uneasily, shaking hands with the woman and glancing at Dean.

“Oh, don’t let Dean’s petulance color your opinion of me.  He’s such a grudge bearer, isn’t he?  Never lets anything go,” Ruby sighed in mocking wistfulness.

Carmen, of course, didn’t agree, but she didn’t defend him either.  He shot her a look and she shrugged.  Ruby laughed and stepped back, swinging the door open to let them in.  Dean grumbled and entered _his_ home.

“Didn’t you used to be blonde?” he asked grumpily.

“I was.  Now I’m a brunette.  Which do you like better?  Blonde Ruby or Brunette Ruby?”

Dean eyed her for a moment before turning his nose up.  “No comment.”

Ruby giggled and nudged Carmen.  “That just means he likes me now.”

“I do not!”

“Dean!”

Dean looked up as his mother came down the hall.  He instantly forgot about Ruby (and her stupid hair color) and stepped forward to meet his mother in a tight embrace.

“Hey, Mom.”

“Hi, sweetie.”

They held on to each long enough that the two women shifting awkwardly behind them reminded them the rest of the world was still there.  Dean pulled back and planted a kiss on his mother’s cheek before turning to beckon Carmen over.  She stepped forward, smiling shyly, and extended her hand to his mother.

“Mom, this is Carmen.  Carmen, my mom, Mary.”

“It’s so nice to meet you,” Mary said smiling brightly shaking Carmen’s hand.  “I wish I could say I’ve heard so much about you, but you know how Dean is with ‘feelings and stuff.’”

Carmen laughed and then bit back her smile when she saw Dean’s expression.

“The fact that I’ve heard of you at all,” his mother continued, “must mean you’re very special.”

Carmen blushed and ducked her head.  Dean smiled; he found her shyness and modesty endearing.  He glanced at Ruby who was giving him a _Seriously?  You don’t do meek_ expression.  He frowned at her.  It was true.  Carmen was markedly different from anybody else he had ever dated, which was maybe why she had stuck around for so much longer.

“Alright, Mom, that’s enough.  Don’t scare her into thinking I’m going to propose or something.”

“That wouldn’t scare me, Dean,” Carmen smiled playfully.

Ruby snorted in amusement.  “He means it would scare him.”

“Who asked you for your opinion?” Dean snapped.

“Fortunately I don’t need to be asked in order to give it.”

Dean made a face at her.  She made one back.  Mary rolled her eyes.

“You two need to quit it.  You’re both adults now.”

“So?” they both said.

Mary pursed her lips and put her hands on her hips.  Dean and Ruby immediately dropped their eyes to their scuffing toes.  Mary reached forward and took the handle of Carmen’s suitcase.  She started to protest, but Mary immediately rolled it to Dean.

“Take this up to your room, and no you don’t have to set Carmen up in the guest room, I already know you’re living together, and Carmen?”

“Ma’am?” Carmen replied, startled—whether by the news that Dean’s mom knew they were living together or that not knowing was even a possibility, Dean wasn’t sure.

“You come with me and I’ll introduce you to Dean’s father and grandparents.”

“Okay.”

Carmen threw a pleading look over her shoulder as Mary ushered her away.  Dean shrugged in half apology.  He gathered up their suitcases and turned to the stairs.  Ruby stood on the bottom stair, her arms stretched wide, hands clasping the banister—quite effectively barring his passage.

“Ruby, come along!” Mary called.

Ruby pouted and stepped down to allow Dean to pass.  He did his best to appear nonplused by her continued presence, but she really grated on his nerves.  He trudged up the stairs, extremely grateful his low maintenance girlfriend packed light, and shuffled down to the room at the end of the hall.  He shouldered it open and found his former bedroom in a state somewhere between home office and home gym.  A double bed was still crammed in the corner, which was the only concession that this had at one point been a bedroom.

Dean looked around for some open space to place their bags, but every corner was filled with the latest fitness equipment fad and every flat surface with tax forms from five years ago.  Hopefully those had been submitted at some point.  Dean turned to the closet and opened the double folding doors.  He stared in amused horror at the floor to ceiling Jenga tower of...crap.  Boxes labeled Dean-Baby, Sam-Art-Projects, For-Garage-Sale, Donate, For-Grandchildren, As-Seen-On-TV-Failures, Old-Tax-Returns, trash bags full of clothes, blankets, and comforters, a bucket with three different cleaning products and the broken handle of a Swiffer mop, empty boxes for a ten year old computer and printer, and an empty fish tank were slotted together so carefully Dean was certain one wrong move would bring it call crashing down on him.  He was about to close the doors and just leave their luggage on the floor when he spotted in the bottom left corner a red and white triangle sticking out of the top of an overstuffed box labeled Dean-High-School.  Dean bent over and grabbed the fabric and pulled on it.  It got stuck, so he pulled harder and froze when the wall-o-junk wavered.  Keeping his eye on the precarious pile he jiggled the red and white object out until he held it in front of him.

Dean let out a small laugh as he looked at the red letterman jacket with white pleather sleeves.  Underneath the giant L (for Lawrence High School) was stitched Winchester.  He shook his head as he looked at the jacket that had probably saved his life in high school.  He hadn't been small or geeky or even awkward, but boy had he been pretty.  He'd known how to shoot guns, how to fix cars, how to snub the ridiculous pop music of his contemporaries, but he hadn't been able to do anything about his hairless face or too plush lips.  And being a boy that was prettier than about two thirds of the female population of the school was definitely something that could have gotten him teased and bullied to within an inch of his life.  But he could kick a football through two yellow poles better than anyone at his school, which got him a starting position on the football team as a sophomore and the all-protective letter jacket.  He still remembered the first day he got to wear it to school.

 

January 1999

 

It was the second week of January and the first day of the new semester.  It was fricken twenty-three degrees outside, which made it perfect weather for wearing his brand new letterman jacket.  Going first string on the football team as a sophomore was a rare event, but it had earned him enough points to get his letter, and his parents had ordered the jacket for him as a Christmas present.  It was red and white, not his favorite colors, and proclaimed him to be part of a rather large and vocal group of male assholes at his high school.  But, so long as he was one of them, he would be left alone.  He didn't wear the jacket to be a part of something, but simply to blend into the background of red and white.  If he was at all the kind of person who gave a shit about fitting in and being normal, he might find that sad.  But he wasn't, so he found himself on Monday morning leaning against a wall of lockers with five other members of the football team.

They were delivering running commentary to the people passing by in the hallways.  It mostly consisted of "nerd" or "freaks" for the guys and "Ooo baby" for the girls.  Dean wasn't participating, nor was he really listening.  He was just grateful to not be a target.  He didn't have any close friends and just sort of drifted from group to group through middle school, not really fitting in with any particular clique.  He was too mechanical for the nerds, too brainy for the cool kids, too mainstream for the Goths, and not quite asocial enough to be a lone wolf.  Becoming a member of the football team had been largely accidental as he had been spotted by the coach kicking soccer  balls through the uprights on the practice field while he waited for the middle school to let out so he could walk his little brother home.  But it had offered him a place in high school and some camouflage as well.  And the team had also accepted him readily as they realized he pulled in more girls than he could reasonably handle at one time and they apparently were not averse to the idea of helping to control the overflow.

So, he wasn't really the kind of guy to stand in a hallway and rag on other people, but neither was he really one to step in and intervene.  His father had taught him how to stand up for himself when need be, so he figured there was no reason why other people shouldn't do the same for themselves.  The exception was Sam, of course.  Anyone picked on him and they would be shitting through their eye sockets.

"Ladies!" Victor shouted beside him, startling Dean out of watching the sign for auditions for the school production of Julius Caesar slowly peel off the wall.

The passing group of cheerleaders all either tittered at the group of football players or pretended to scoff at their demeaning behavior but secretly loving the attention.

"Hi, Dean!" two chorused in unison.

Dean smiled and gave them a wave.  One was named Cassie and she gave absolutely amazing head.  But he only knew that because he totally respected her mind.

"Man, you total dog," Brian laughed as he nudged him.

Dean didn't respond to the baiting.  If dating one girl for two months made him a dog, then he guessed that's what he was.   He never saw the point in correcting other people's opinions of him; they weren't likely to change them even if they knew the full truth.  So, he didn't tell people that even though he'd gotten to third base with Cassie, he was technically still a virgin.  People could assume he was banging half the cheerleading squad if they wanted to.  Just like he didn't correct the assumption that he was straight.  It wasn't incorrect that he liked girls, so he didn't feel the need to point out that he liked boys too.  Certainly not while he was still in high school at any rate.

Dean saw them before the rest of the team did.  He repressed his sigh.  He knew what would happen as soon as the three girls and one boy all dressed in black and all wearing eyeliner passed in front of them.  Sure enough, as soon as they were spotted, the team started in on them.  They mostly focused their abuse on the boy.  A scrawny, miserable looking thing that always had the appearance of an anxious squirrel.

"Hey fag," Gordon practically yelled, always being the most vocal when it came to this particular individual.  "I see you got your hags with you.  Did you guys comb the crabs out of your bush last night?"

The other players and lot of the people in the hall snickered, mostly at the words being said at all than the pretty lame insult.  But it was more than enough to make the boy hunch his shoulders and the three girls to glare at him.

"Or maybe you were too busy sucking dick in an alley for ten bucks a pop."

"Shut-up, Gordon!" one of the girls yelled.

"Ooooo!" went the hallway-audience.

"All you're doing is showing how insecure you are!  There's nothing wrong with being gay!"

"Anna!" the boy hissed.

"Actually, there is," Gordon said menacingly.  "The _Bible_ says it's a sin.  And that it ain't natural!"

The hallway went still and quiet as everyone looked back and forth between Gordon and the small group in black.

"The _Bible_ also says that slavery is okay," a strong voice suddenly said, drawing everyone's attention.  "So maybe I should ask you to get me a mint julep."

There was a shocked gasp and everyone stared at the tall, striking figure looking sinfully good in his JROTC uniform that showed off his strong shoulders and narrow hips.  There was a mocking smirk on full lips, glee in his brilliant blue eyes, and dark hair that would just not stay in the military precision it was undoubtedly combed into everyday.  Dean took in a discreet, deep breath.  Good God was Castiel Engel hot.

"Besides," Castiel continued as he walked down the hall, his dress shoes clicking sharply on the tile, "Chuck has never said he's gay, so I find it odd that you seem so sure that it's fact.  But, I guess, it takes one to know one."

Everyone tried to repress their snickers, including the football team.  Dean just smiled at Castiel's swinging pair of titanium balls.  Then those blue eyes slid to him for just a moment, and Castiel winked.  Dean started and watched Castiel walk down the hall until he disappeared among the suddenly dispersing students as the warning bell rang indicating class would start in five minutes.  Had he been implying that he knew Dean was something to know about?  And if he did, did that mean that Castiel was also like him since he was able to recognize it in Dean?  Dean made a face as he reviewed his thoughts—what now?

"That little fucking shit!" Gordon roared.

Everyone near him started.  He'd spent so long spluttering impotently that they figured he was just going to lose that battle spectacularly.

"This afternoon we're finding him in the parking lot and—"

"Let it go, Walker," Victor said as he leveraged himself off the lockers and started walking to class.

Gordon turned hard eyes on Victor.

"I can't believe you're saying it's okay to let him get away with this.  In this already whitewashed, racist town, you're saying it's okay for him to pull shit like that?"

Victor shrugged.  "He had a point.  He made it poorly, but maybe it's a good thing for you to feel like shit for once."

Dean, Brian, and the left tackle who was a senior and Dean could never remember his name, looked back and forth at Victor and Gordon as they glared each other down.  Brian pointed vaguely in a direction.

"So, I've got to get to class," he said as he edged away.

Victor and Gordon broke eye contact and walked away in different directions.  Left Tackle made a clicking sound with his tongue and walked away too.  Dean could feel his inner voice grumbling.  What good was a powerful high school clique if it ate itself from the inside out?  He turned to walk toward his own class, alone in the hallway now.  He forced his thoughts away from the football team.  He wondered if he should start up a Rainbow Club or something to discourage racism.  Colleges liked that sort of thing, right?  Wait, wasn't the rainbow a gay pride thing?

Dean cursed softly at the smile tugging at the corner of lips as he entered his chemistry class just as the bell rang.  The teacher gave him a raised eyebrow, but technically he had been on time.  He couldn't be bothered to worry about the teacher's disappointment as he settled into his assigned seat along the black countertop benches; his thoughts were now squarely back on Castiel Engel.  He rolled his chair into the space under the bench and crossed his arms on the cool top so that his lower half was tucked away from sight.  The possible scenarios that were popping into his head if Castiel had indeed been implying _something_ with that wink were making it increasingly difficult not to succumb to his fifteen year old hormones.

And that had to be the answer right there.  He was fifteen; if a breeze got a potted plant rustling just the right way he could pop a chubby.  He was just seeing what he wanted to see, which was a cute, older (by three whole months) man in uniform showing interest in getting horizontal with him.  Or heck, vertical.  He may not be practically experienced in sex, but he had a ton of didactic knowledge.  He smiled thinking of his latest Internet find.  It may have taken two hours just to load the webpage on the dial-up modem, but it had been enlightening to see exactly how a two-guy-one-girl threesome worked.

Dean froze in a panic as he tried to remember if he had cleared the history on the browser the last time he had used the family computer in the study.  He mentally shrugged and shook it off.  If Sam found it he could use the instruction too.  And if his parents found it, he doubted either of them would be willing to bring it up to him in favor of avoiding awkward conversations about sex and sexuality.  He was pretty sure it wouldn't even occur to his dad that there being two guys in the pictures was indicative of any same sex tendencies because the naked titties would be enough of a distraction.  Dean hadn't decided yet whether or not to come out to his family.  He figured maybe he could just wait to see if he ever met someone that he was so in love with he wanted spend the rest of his life with them, and if that person was male, then bring it up.  He didn't consider himself a coward, just practical.

Mr. Lake began his lecture right on the chapter they'd left off on.  He had no regard for his students who had just suffered through his midterm and were still mind-foggy from the holidays.  Why were science and math teachers the devil?  He was certain he was right at least in the case of the math teacher who taught the advanced level classes.  He actively recruited poor unsuspecting middle schoolers to his Mathletes team—he'd even taken a run at Sam already and he was still a year away from being an eligible eighth grader.  Dude was creepy.  And apparently somehow distantly related to them on their mom's side.

Well, math and creepy old dudes were certainly enough to make his hard on for Castiel pretty much fizzle into nothing.  Though it probably wouldn't take much to bring it back: he both loved and hated the days Castiel had to wear his JROTC uniform.  Fortunately he only saw him, ironically enough, in math class, so he didn't have to spend all day with a notebook in front of his crotch.

His lab partner flopped her notebook open next to him and he remembered he was in chemistry class.  Then he looked at the clock on the wall.  His heart sank.  He'd been in class for two minutes and it felt like half an hour already.  He really couldn't think of a worse way to start off his mornings than going over IUPAC naming conventions.  Well, maybe math would be worse.  But at least his days would end better than last semester.  His core classes hadn't changed, but his electives had swapped out.  Instead of Speech (which had been tortuous; he did not like public speaking) he had study hall aka nap time.  His last period had been Health/PE/Driver's Ed—which he'd been able to take early since his birthday was in January.  Two more weeks and he'd have his license, which corresponded spectacularly with his new elective of Auto Shop.  His dad had promised him that if he proved he had the real interest to do it (and helped finance half of the endeavor) he'd help him buy and fix up a vintage car.  More than likely Auto Shop class would be a little below his skill level since he already knew a lot from his father, but maybe it would show his dad that he was committed to the plan.  Also it would be an easy A to help balance the C he would inevitably get in his last year of required foreign language.  He did fine in English, why was French so frickin' hard?

"Dean!"

Dean started and looked at his lab partner.  Lisa looked a little annoyed.

"Can you get us a pair of goggles from the back of the room?"

"Yeah, sure.  Wait, we're doing an experiment today?  Shouldn't we, like, learn something first?"

"Um, we were supposed to have read the last chapter over winter break."

Dean blinked.  And then laughed.  He continued to laugh as he made his way to the back of the classroom to claim two pairs of smelly, scratched up safety goggles.

"Something funny, Mr. Winchester?" Mr. Lake asked in a not amused voice.

"Yeah," Dean got out around laughs.  "You."

Dean spent the remainder of first period sitting in the front office.  The principal didn't even want to see him.

 

The rest of the first day back was similarly not fun.  Apparently all of his classes had assigned winter break homework.  But he hadn't read _A Separate Peace_ for English, he hadn't memorized the inverse functions for sine or cosine (though he did know that Castiel tended to sit with his body bent in perfect ninety degree angles), and he had no clue how to say that he set the Christmas tree on fire during his winter break in French.  None of that mattered by seventh period though; it was time to literally get his hands dirty and get down to real work.  He loved doing things with his hands.  It made him feel more...real.  As stupid as that sounded.

 ~~finish~~

Present

 

Dean ran his fingers over the material of the jacket softly, remembering how Cas' hands used to do that.  Dean wondered if he'd be coming to the funeral.  It would be interesting to see him again after...God.  Fourteen years.  Dean tossed the jacket back in the closet.  He shut the doors and just decided to leave their bags on the floor for now.  They could figure out what to do with them later and he was starving.


	2. Destiel AU - A/B/O

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I started an alpha/omega fic. Don't look at me. Dean is a poor oppressed omega with serious commitment issues but an almost uncontrollable libido (I said don't look at me) but has a chance to make it with the alphas at his company if he can land the Crowley account. This sends him to New York City where he meets an alpha piano player who likes to play the omega role. So, omega!Dean spends a lot of time fucking alpha!Castiel and trying to pretend like he's not falling in love.
> 
> Very little of this is written (Cas hasn't shown up yet) and the sex scene is between Dean/OMC.

Dean checked his watch, which was a little difficult to read since he was being jerked back and forth, but he was pretty sure he'd been in this backroom for at least fifteen minutes now.  And he'd been bored for at least nine of those.  He leaned his elbow on the window sill he was bent in front of and placed his chin in his palm.  He examined the pretty designs made by Jack Frost.  Maybe now would be a good time to reflect on his life and figure out how he got here.

He'd been born and raised in Boston, MA, but his affluent parents had traveled enough and took their children on enough international vacations and enrolled them in private schools so that he and his brother had escaped their wicked pisser childhoods without lingering accents.  They were, of course, obnoxious Red Sox fans, but that was unavoidable.

He'd lived a pretty typical life though perhaps a bit more privileged than the average American.  He'd been in the top of his classes, but not valedictorian.  He'd gotten into Boston College and Tufts, but not Harvard.  He'd had a good though not disgustingly close relationship with his parents and brother and he had a lot of friends, a few of whom he would even say he was close with.  He had a great job as an ad executive that he excelled at even if he did say so himself.  And even better, he had managed to work his way almost to the top of the company not only by his own merit, but in spite of the perceived disability of being an omega.  And even that was probably because most people thought he was one of those rare betas.

Betas could sometimes manage small alpha knots and produce some omega slick, but they couldn't successfully reproduce with either gender.  What they were useful for though was not giving off those distracting omega hormones or having to take a week off from work four times a year to go through their heats.  There was also an argument that they lacked the aggressive hotheadedness that usually got alphas into trouble, but in a world run by alphas that argument wasn't as important.

Dean, however, was not a beta.  He was an omega.  And he didn't mind.  As long as they weren't in heat, omegas tended to lead alphas around by their noses (no pun intended) without them even realizing it.  Omegas had more power than they realized.  Except for the rampant sexism that prevented them from being taken seriously in the workplace, kept them from getting promoted beyond secretaries and mail clerks, and even prevented them from running for public office in some countries.  Not that America was that progressive; Dean could count on one hand the number of omegas that held a national level public office and they were all House members.  Not a single omega had ever been a Senator let alone President.  Even though suppressants had been completely proven to keep an omega's heat in check the stereotype that they were emotionally unstable still dominated the social landscape.

Dean was lucky.  He was big.  And not just for an omega.  He was taller and broader through the shoulders than a lot of alphas.  And the suppressants he took to rid himself of his heats seemed to work so well his scent was so faint most people would have to be practically on top of him to catch a whiff.  So, people tended to think he was a beta since he clearly also gave off zero dominant alpha pheromones.  Therefore when he pitched ideas and gave his opinions they weren't dismissed out of hand as something some silly omega had said.  His direct supervisors and the CEO of the company he worked for knew of course, but they were fairly progressive and had no problem promoting him along with his other deserving alpha coworkers.  Of course, they all had omega secretaries, including Dean himself, but really he was a selfish creature more interested in making sure he got what he wanted out of life rather than fighting for equality.  He'd leave that to the omega rights activists out there.  He had done his part though; he'd helped design one of the campaigns for the biggest organizations pro bono.  Well, he'd done it for free so he could keep his name unattached.  He wasn't stupid.  His bosses might not mind that he was a butch omega that could keep his scent to himself, but they wouldn't stand for someone at their company using their assets for political movements.  Not even conservative ones.  A junior partner had been fired not too long ago for donating company funds (that he claimed he was going to pay back) to a group supporting the sterilization of omegas mated by family members that were first cousins or closer in relation.  Never mind that most of those omegas were usually minors who had been raped when their heats had come upon them suddenly and other young family members had been unable to control themselves.  If anyone asked Dean that money would be better spent in the research being done that hypothesized a mating bond could be broken.  But no one ever asked Dean.  Because he was an omega.

But all that aside (he really wasn't bitter about being an omega at all, probably because he had a better lot than most, but whatever) he had a great life.  So why did he do this to himself?  Was it a subconscious hatred of his own gender that turned him into a raging slut cliché?  Was it the ludicrous theory that the suppressants that worked so well for him actually sent him though mini-heats once a week and made him super horny?  Was it the two traumatizing incidents that had happened with his brother when they were younger that made him seek out bigger and bigger alphas to submit to?  That last one was a distinct possibility, but he wasn't going to allow himself to think about it.  Like, ever.

Well, whatever the reason, he was back in the copy room during his office's holiday party getting drilled by some Neanderthal the approximate size of a middle linebacker.  The Neanderthal part came in right around the same time this little tryst stopped being interesting.  There'd been three meaty fingers thrusting and crooking in Dean's soaking wet hole, and whispered filth in his ear that only made him wetter.  Dean had been more than ready for the man's (and he was either an executive at a rival company or a client, he couldn't remember) generously proportioned cock to take his fingers' place when Dean had pulled the knot ring out of his pants and made no more of a request than a raised eyebrow.  The man had sighed dramatically but grudgingly slipped it on saying he understood how mating someone you'd known for all of thirty minutes wasn't a good idea even though he _was_ ready for a fifth wife.

The man had then rammed into Dean without ceremony.  It had taken three jerking shoves for him to bottom out despite Dean being obscenely wet and more than spread; he was huge after all.  And that should have made Dean euphoric.  There was nothing he loved more than an alpha cock that could make him feel like a blushing omega virgin.  But despite being ambivalent to the Omega Pride movement, he despised polygamy.  Not adultery.  He'd fucked mated alphas before, but he'd never let one of them try to claim him.  Not that he'd ever had any notion of letting any alpha mate him, not even one that claimed he didn't want kids and would let Dean continue to work at his job.  Once he was mated he'd lose all desire to hook up with random strangers, and where was the fun in that?  So, no, he had no respect for the "sanctity" of the mating bond.  But he knew for a fact that about 95% of alphas that mated multiple partners treated their omegas like shit.  And that was kind of a turn off.

Which was why the giant currently plowing into him hadn't even noticed Dean was no longer actively participating.  He was probably also one of those alphas who thought an omega couldn't orgasm without a knot.  And Dean knew that absolutely wasn't true, but he wasn't going to try to convince this guy of that.  He just wanted him to hurry up and finish.  And this encounter had started out so promising.  The guy was fucking huge.  Everywhere.  Quite possibly he was a full foot taller and six inches broader through the shoulders than Dean.  His chest was approximately barrel sized, his thighs like hanks of beef, and as previously mentioned, his endowment would make most horses green with envy.  The guy was a fucking monster.  This should be awesome.  But then there was the constant prattle in his ear.

"Damn, baby, you're different from my bitches.  I mean, don't get me wrong, they each got some pretty little cunts on 'em, but it's not like this.  Not like you, pretty.  They're all so small and delicate.  I can't get on them like this."  He got Dean's hips in a bruising grip and shoved his thick meat hard and deep enough into Dean that his slick squelched out of him.  Dean clenched his fingers futilely into the metal window sill and threw his head back with a lewd moan.  Okay.  That had felt good.  Then the man ruined it by returning to his previous driving pace and started talking again.

"Yeah, my little China doll...he's beautiful.  I can't even tell you.  Gives head like a fucking Cambodian orphan, but can barely stand the fit of my knot for more than half an hour.  But my blonde, well he can stay tied up on me for days, but then afterwards he always wants to talk about his damn feelings.  And my first wife, well, I love him, but, damn, he's almost thirty-five now."  Dean wondered if this would be a bad time to mention that he was thirty-two.  "I guess that's why I went out and got myself a beta.  He's a redhead.  Real feisty and sturdily built.  But, nothing like you.  None of them can take a pounding quite like you.  Sure you don't want my knot, gorgeous?"

"More than ever."

The man hooked a hand under Dean's knee and stood up straight, pulling Dean back again his chest and spreading his legs apart, forcing his suit pants to stretch dangerously at the seams.  The man's other hand was on Dean's chest holding him upright as he wailed away at Dean's ass.  Dean started making the most embarrassing grunting moans, but finally, _finally_ , the man was hitting his prostate with every thrust and even though he wouldn't spare a hand for his cock, Dean might be able to get off after all.

"Yeah, that's what I thought, bitch.  You love this.  Don't say you don't want it.  Feels so good, doesn't it?  _Doesn't it?_ "  The man emphasized his second question with a violent thrust.  Dean groaned shamelessly, and it sounded unfortunately like an affirmation.  "Thought so.  God, I wanna knot you so badly.  You know you want it too.  Can't get off without it, bitch.  And don't worry.  I'll take good care of you.  Would love to watch that pretty omega cock of yours fuck my beta while I tie you off."

Dean whimpered in pleasure and hated himself for being such a sick freak that dirty talk about things he wouldn't even want to do could get him off.  Although, it might be interesting to see what a beta's ass felt like, especially while being filled.  But not knotted.  Because, ew.

"Aw, shit, I'm gonna blow, babe.  Fuck you feel so good.  Fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuck...!"

Dean tried to tune him out now.  He was close and a litany of fucks was so not sexy.  He chanced throwing them off balance by removing a hand from where he was bracing them against the wall to circle his cock.  He didn't try to lick his hand for lubrication or jack himself the way he liked.  He grabbed it hard and pulled fast.  It was a race against the meathead behind him.  Dean felt the heat build in his groin and he tried to work it out.  Yeah, it wouldn't be good like it could be with the pleasure radiating though his whole body, but with this guy he'd be lucky if he wouldn't have to jerk himself off in the bathrooms afterwards.  Or worse, just let his erection fade with no satisfaction at all.  No way.  This asshole owed him an orgasm, no matter how mediocre.

The man groaned loud and hot in his ear and flooded his hole with warm alpha spunk.  Well, at least his neurosis was good for something.  That was more than enough to send him crashing over the edge, shooting his load over his fist to splatter against the frosted window.  Dean panted and swallowed thickly as the alpha continued to thrust slowly through his own orgasm.  He was struck with the thought that his jizz made some lovely patterns as it slid down the cold pane.

"Huh," the man behind him said.  "You came without a knot.  I must be even better than I thought."

Dean rolled his eyes and barely refrained from making a face at his reflection in the window.  The man finally let Dean put his leg down and pulled out with some disturbingly arousing slurping sounds.  When he was out, Dean felt like he had an open crater in his ass.  Maybe he'd been _too_ big.  He better do some kegel exercises later.

"Hey, pretty, you can wipe yourself off with this."

Dean turned and saw the man removing his tie.  He held the silky fabric out to him with a dirty smile.  Dean took it and could tell the material was expensive.  Hell, it might actually be real silk.  Probably an anniversary gift from one of his wives.  He turned away from the man and began wiping down his thighs.  He honestly didn't care if the pervert was going to jack off with it pressed to his face later.  Dean didn't have those sort of qualms.

"So, does your beta actually let you call him a 'wife?'"

The man frowned as he pulled off the knot ring and tossed it onto the floor where it rolled across the tile and disappeared under a photocopier.  "What else would I call him?"

Dean shrugged and wadded the tie up more to get the last bit of slick and semen out from between his legs.

"I don't know.  But he is a beta.  You can't actually mate him, so he can't really be your wife."

"He's my bitch.  Same difference," the man shrugged as he zipped and buttoned up his pants.

Dean tossed the soiled tie at the man.  "Classy," he said sarcastically as he fastened his own pants.

"I'm sorry, but where do you get off judging me?  _Omega_."

Dean laughed shortly.  "Yeah.  And you wonder why I'm hesitant to let you knot me and become your precious fifth bitch."

The man smirked, which actually sent a wave of relief through Dean.  Just as likely he could have gotten angry, and while Dean wasn't afraid to stand up for himself, even physically and against an alpha, he was at a work function.  Plus, the guy was fucking huge.

"God, your sass just makes me want you more."

"Well," Dean said, "This was...great.  Really.  But, I should get back to the party.  Schmooze.  That sort of thing."

"Do secretaries really need to schmooze?  Or...oh!  I see.  You've already 'schmoozed' me.  I hate to break it to you, darling, but as sweet as your ass is, I'm not going to bring my company's contract here just to tap it again."

"Thank goodness," Dean said dryly.  "It's so rare to see integrity in the corporate world nowadays."

The man chuckled and ran a meaty hand down Dean's back to his ass and then got himself a handful.  He turned Dean's face with two fingers pressed against his jaw and leaned down to lick Dean's lips.

"You're a real peach, doll.  A real _peach_."  He squeezed his ass hard and Dean sucked in a hissing breath through his teeth.  Damn there was something wrong with him because he wanted a round two with the guy.

"Again, I thank you for your compliments.  You should try the pâté.  I heard it was flown in from Brussels."

The man just laughed as Dean left the copy room.  He straightened his clothes and ran a hand through his short hair to make it look at least somewhat less like he'd just snuck off to have sex with a client in the copy room.  And he remembered now after the man's comment: he was one of the representatives for Nike that his company was trying to lure away from their current marketing company.  Giving him a sassy fuck could be one way to do it.  Or maybe that was one way to convince the man that he shouldn't take SEDIFY seriously as a rising marketing company.  This could seriously come back to bite him in the ass.  Why couldn't he control his desire to be manhandled like a Hispanic in Arizona during a traffic stop?

Dean walked down the hall that led back to the absurdly large conference room where the party was being held.  Along the way he passed a couple making out and rutting in a dark corner.  He did a double take as he recognized his secretary.  He couldn't tell who he was with, but the scent of Alex's slick was heavy in the air and the alpha he was with was potent enough to cause Dean's hole to give an interested throb.  He really hoped the Nike guy would put that tie somewhere for safe keeping before returning to the party.  He didn't mind some stranger he was probably never going to see again doing kinky things with it, but he really didn't want the whole office to know what he smelled like.

Dean cracked his neck as the sounds of jazzy Christmas music got louder.  He steeled himself for reentering the room.  One of the reasons he'd been so willing to flee with the human shaped dildo was because the party itself was quite possibly the most boring event he'd ever been to in his life.  And he counted a nephew's christening, a cousin's kindergarten gradation, and last year's holiday party among those events.

Inside was pretty much the way he'd left it: low lighting, a constant din of murmuring voices, and a long line at the open bar.  At least his bosses weren't stingy.  The only thing different was there was a slightly elevated level of pheromones in the air.  But that tended to happen at boring parties where the alcohol was free.  Might also explain why Alex, who was usually such a total choir boy, was giving it up in semi public.

"Winchester!"

Dean turned at the sound of his name and gave his best fake great-to-see-you smile as his immediate supervisor approached him.  He did actually like his boss, but that didn't mean a guy still wasn't supposed to brownnose every now and then.

"Bob!  How are you?  Love the tie.  Did the misuses pick it out for you?"  It was green.  With a reindeer on it.  With a blinking red nose.  Dean had to bite his lip to keep the grin off his face as he imagined trying to clean his come-soaked hole with _that_ tie.

"Aw, quit yankin' my chain!  You'll understand when you finally settle down and your missus starts picking out your clothes."

Dean let out a small, choked laugh.  "Yeah, except, I'd be the missus."

His boss put on an "Oh, yeah" face.  "Oh, yeah," he said.  "I always forget you're an omega.  Better not say you smell good then.  Don't wanna end up in another sexual harassment seminar!"

His boss guffawed and slapped him on the back as Dean tried to fend off a blush.  In fact, _he_ had been  the one sent to a sexual harassment seminar for saying Alex smelled good one day.  He'd been referring to the new cologne his secretary had been given by his boyfriend (and he hoped that was who was out in the hall with him now), but another secretary from another floor who didn't know him overheard and reported him.  He guessed she'd thought he was an alpha or a beta or something.  Either way it resulted in Dean having to spend an entire work day in sensitivity training with three other alpha managers.  He had to be the only omega in the world that had ever been sent to sensitivity training.  And no one would ever let him live it down; that had been almost three years ago now.

Dean gritted his teeth and laughed at the joke even though it was in poor taste because the guy was his boss after all.

"Come with me, Dean.  We're going to go have a talk with Mr. Stewart.  He's been complimenting your work for a while now and wants to meet you in person."

Dean just blinked, completely stunned.  "Mr. Stewart wants to see me?"

Bob's only response was a smile and a wink as he put a hand on Dean's shoulder and guided him across the room to the CEO and co-founder of SEDIFY.


	3. Destiel AU - Fae

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someone wrote an adorable prompt about fairy!Cas who likes apples and human!Dean who owns an orchard. Cas is small enough to be squashed by an apple if that helps give you an idea of his size. I had plans to write two versions--a fluffy one and a supper weird/crack/fucked up one where Dean does have sort of sex with tiny fairy Cas.
> 
> Basically nothing is written. It's all still mostly in my head.

Castiel propped his elbow on the flat cap of a mushroom, and leaned his face on his hand so heavily his cheek smooshed up to almost cover his right eye.  He was about three seconds from falling completely asleep.  Raphael had such a monotone voice that lacked any sort of inflection.  And it matched his serious face and flat grey wings that barely had any iridescence.  There was a running joke that his mother must have had an affair with a human during one of the centennial veil drops.  That was the only explanation for such a plain, joyless fae.

Castiel wasn't the only one about to fall asleep as they listened to the droning of their instructor.  Inias and Rachael were playing boxes by using their fingers to scratch lines into their shared mushroom cap.  Gabriel was snickering to himself as he wrote a note on a daisy petal.  Balthazar actually _was_ asleep.  Only Sammandriel sat up straight and seemed to be listening to Raphael's serious and overly dramatic warnings.

Their ages ranged from twenty summers to ninety-seven, but it would be the first time any of them experienced a drop in the veil between the fairy world and the human world.  But it was still one full cycle of the moon before it happened.  Their time could be better spent doing other things—like skimming across the swan pond and avoiding the gaping mouths of the fish underneath or hiding under the petals of brightly colored cornflowers in order to scare the wing dust off feeding butterflies or, in Castiel's case, sneaking off to the orchard near the human farm and stuffing himself with sweet, juicy apple.

"Now you must all remember to guard your thoughts and wishes during a veil drop," Raphael was saying.  "It may be fun to try being a different size and to lose your wings to blend in, but if you truly desire the change you could remain permanently caught in the human world."

Sammandriel raised a hand.  "I thought that was myth!"

"Is that supposed to be a question?" Raphael asked with a glare at being interrupted.

Sammandriel shrunk down, his long pointed ears laying flat and his wings plastering to his back.

"For thousands of years the fae have taken the opportunity to play amongst the humans on the veil drop.  We walk amongst them for one night and one day, playing tricks, causing mayhem..."  he cleared his throat.  "...seducing virgins."  Everyone in the class (except Balthazar who was still snoozing) snickered.  "And then we return to our side and let the veil fall back in place.  For millennia this was how we fae took our revenge on the humans for spreading their magic-less blood and disbelief throughout the world.  Trampling over all the natural world.  It's no wonder the mystical creatures on the other side of the veil are all but extinct.  They are so blind to magic they don't even see us when they kill us!  Splattering us on their speeding, steel animals.  Sweeping us into mass graves after suffocating us with their black smoke!  Humans are dangerous.  Humans are evil.  Mother Life no longer speaks to them!  They survive on their _science_!"

Every eye blinked in astonishment at Raphael as he panted, riled up from his rant.  Even Balthazar was awake now.  Sammandriel raised his hand timidly.

"Um.  But how do we get stuck on the other side?"

Raphael clasped his hands behind his back and walked slowly and back and forth in front of his charges.


	4. Destiel AU - Ocean Boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I might try to finish this one for the DCBB 2014, if I can get my sequel to Angel Slayer finished by spring. Basically I am rewriting the Australian TV Show "Ocean Girl" as a Destiel fic. Though Cas' origins would not be the same as Neri's.
> 
> I have like fifteen pages of hand written notes for this. I want this to happen.

**Prologue**  

Dean kept his hands on Sam’s shoulders as the casket slowly lowered into the ground.  He tried to remember that all it contained was the weak, broken husk that had failed her in the end, but he couldn’t quite escape the mental image that his _mother_ was trapped in that box, being put into the ground, and was about to be covered with shovelful after shovelful of dirt.  Of course, it wouldn’t actually be filled in with shovels; there was a small bulldozer not quite hanging out inconspicuously by another grouping of headstones.  The blue tarp that covered the pile of dirt that would go into the grave was a poor imitation of the vibrant, clear blue skies overhead.  The sun was shining and birds were chirping.  Cicada buzzing faded in and out, in and out in the summer morning.  It was only nine o’clock but it was very warm out; it would be stifling later.  Late August in the mid-Atlantic was not the friendliest weather one could ask for.  But his mother would have liked today.  She had always been cold, especially towards the end, so the thick, sweltering heat would have felt good.

He felt Sam’s shoulders shift under his hands as he raised an arm to swipe against his nose.  He sniffed, but he wasn’t crying.  They’d gotten all their tears out four days ago as they sat at her hospital bed and held her hands as they’d watched her slip away while she’d been unconscious.  Dean couldn’t decide if it was best she wasn’t aware as it happened or if she would have wanted to see them one last time before the end.  They’d more or less said their goodbyes the previous day just before she’d fallen into the coma.

Dean lifted his eyes and saw his father standing across the grave with his hands clasped together in front of him.  He was tanner than he remembered and sporting a graying beard.  Partially hidden behind the set of chairs on that side of the grave was a small black suitcase.  The man had had to come directly from the airport just to make it to the funeral on time.  Anger flared in his chest again.  He tugged on Sam and got him to turn and follow him back up towards the rented black Cadillac the funeral home had provided as part of their service.  It would drive them back to their house where their more distant relatives had already returned in order to prepare for the wake.  Mary Winchester had been well known and much loved—there were going to be a lot of people to have to “put on a brave face for.”  He was pretty certain he was going to punch somebody tonight.

“Dean.”

Dean stopped walking and Sammy wouldn’t let go of his hand, so he stopped too.  But neither of them turned to look at their father.  There was a silence that was filled with John’s desperate search for words.

“You have to talk to me,” he finally said.

“Not today, I don’t,” Dean replied and continued up the hill.

 ~~~

The next day Dean, Sam, Grandma Deanna, and Cousin Gwen were in Mary’s bedroom, putting clothes into boxes for donation, sorting her good jewelry from her costume jewelry, and in general picking her life apart into little pieces and piles and separating what was worth keeping and what wasn’t.  He thought everything was worth keeping, but he’d been overruled.  So far he’d only managed to keep for himself a bronze arm cuff he remembered running chubby fingers over when she’d held him as a very small child.  He didn’t know what he would do with it though; he supposed it could be a paperweight.

“Dean?”

Dean looked up as Sam held up a shoebox full of birthday and mother’s day cards she’d accumulated from them over the years.

“Should we keep these?”

Dean repressed a sigh.  “It’s up to you, Sammy.  It’ll just be another box collecting dust in your closet.  What’s more important are the cards she wrote to you.  Do you still have those?”

Sam nodded.  Dean held out the garbage bag in his hands.  Sam hesitated before dropping the box inside.  For a moment he looked like he was going to reach inside the bag and retrieve the precious box, but then Deanna wrapped him up in a hug and he cried quietly in her arms.  Dean ran a hand down his face.  He thought they’d been ready for this.  It’s not like their mother’s death had been a surprise.  But, God, it was still a shock.

There was a light knocking on the door frame and everyone except Sam turned to look to see who was intruding upon them.  Dean turned his back as soon as he saw John Winchester.

“Well, it’s almost lunchtime,” Gwen said.  “Why don’t we take a break?  I’ll go downstairs and make some sandwiches.”

“Sam and I will help,” Deanna said.

Dean gritted his teeth and gave his grandmother and second whatever cousin removed a betrayed look as they filed past John and left the bedroom.  He dropped the garbage bag to the floor and moved to sit on the stripped mattress.  He stared glumly at his hands and picked at a loose cuticle.  After a couple of minutes he felt the bed shift beside him as John sat down.

“Dean, I’m sorry.  I didn’t want this to happen.”

Dean let out a disgusted noise and picked at his finger all the harder.  “It never crossed my mind that you wanted Mom to die slowly and horribly of pancreatic cancer.”

John sucked in a breath.

“But why didn’t you come back sooner?  I _told_ you she was getting worse.  We— _Sam_ needed your support.”  Dean grimaced as he ripped the skin off and his finger started to bleed.

“I…”  John inhaled deeply.  “I don’t know why I didn’t listen.  I was in the middle of a project.  And it didn’t seem like she was any worse than she had been before…”

Dean wrapped a hand around his finger to staunch the blood flow and looked up to meet his father’s eyes.

“No, it was _just_ the project.  You’re always working on your _project_.  Still chasing your white whale, Dad?  Looking for your sea monster?  It’s a fantasy.  It’s not real.”

John dropped his eyes.  “Metaphor or not, Moby Dick was real.”

“Yeah, and it killed everyone.  Ahab lost everything.”

“Maybe I’m Ishmael.”

Dean stood up with a frustrated shout.  “Enough with the analogies!  _We_ are real.  And we’re orphans now.”

John’s head snapped up and he looked more angry than hurt though the latter was what Dean had been aiming for.

“You’re not _orphans_.”

“Well, it sure feels like it.  What are we supposed to do?  I mean, I can take care of Sammy, but are you gonna pay the mortgage here or should we find a smaller apartment?  Aside from that all we need is like a monthly stipend for food and clothes and—”

John stood up abruptly.  “Do you really think I’m going to leave a fifteen and eleven year old alone?  You must be joking.”

“I’m almost sixteen, in case you’ve forgotten my birthday again—”

“It's almost half a year away—”

“—and I’ve been taking care of Sam _and_ Mom for years.”

“I know,” John said quietly.  “And you’re, unfortunately, not a child though you still should be.”

Dean was surprised his father acknowledged that so readily.

“But you’re not living by yourselves.”

“So, we’ve got a choice between the grandparents.”

John raised an eyebrow.  “Do you really want to live with either?”

Dean suppressed a groan.  Even though he’d already worked out how he would take care of Sam until he graduated high school and could get a job, he hadn’t actually believed anyone would go along with his plan.  So, that meant he was either going to be stuck in Illinois with Grandpa Winchester or fricken’ Kansas with Grandma and Grandpa Campbell.  Neither was appealing based on location alone, and Henry Winchester was very strict.  Well, so was Samuel Campbell when he got down to it, but at least Deanna was there to temper him most of the time.  But that still left the unappealing prospect of living in Lawrence, Kansas.

John was looking at him expectantly.  He actually wanted an answer.

“No,” Dean grumped.

“Good.  Because I didn’t want you living with them—either of them—anyway.  I want you with me.”

Dean felt something akin to hope leap in his chest.  He hadn’t felt anything remotely close to this since his mother was diagnosed two and a half years ago.

“You’re moving back to the States?”  Try as he might he couldn’t keep the happy desperation out of his voice.

“No.”

Dean deflated.

“My project was a success.”

Dean crossed his arms and looked at the floor.  Part of him wanted to be happy for his father’s success, but his work was what had caused a riff first between the man and his wife, and then his children.  He was so narrowly focused on finding this missing link sea creature that he had spent the better part of a decade living in squalor and moving from tiny, poor shipping ports to even tinier and poorer fishing villages.

“Congratulations,” Dean said flatly.  “But I’m not letting you move Sam to fucking Cambodia or somewhere he won’t—”

“Watch your language,” his father snapped and Dean immediately went silent.  The man took in a deep breath and closed his eyes.  When he opened them again, there was no trace of anger or irritation.  He sat down on the mattress.  “Dean, please sit down.”

Dean complied, but kept his arms crossed over his stomach.

“The project I was working on was almost like an application, if you will.  Since it was successful I was awarded a grant.  And more importantly, a post on CORAL.  Have you heard of CORAL?”

“Yeah, I’ve been to the beach—oh, wait.  You mean that research facility in the Pacific Ocean.”

John nodded.

“Yeah, I saw it discussed on the news when it first opened last year.  And we learned a little bit about it in science class.  Like, it stands for Ocean Research and a laboratory or something?”

“Coalition for Oceanographic Research Aquatic Laboratory.”

“Right, right.  It’s supposed to be all fancy and high tech, right?  Latest equipment, best scientists.  It’s like, partially built underwater.”

“It is.  I haven’t been there myself yet, but I hear it’s amazing.”

Dean shrugged a shoulder.  “Great.  Good for you.  What does that have to do with you wanting us to live with you?  It’s closer to Australia than it is to Hawaii.  That will be one bitch of a commute.”

John frowned.  “Where did you pick up this foul language?”

“School.”

John’s frowned deepened, but he let it go.  “I guess they didn’t teach you about the details of the set up then.  The experiments and research that are being conducted at CORAL are meant to be _very_ long term.  As such the facility has been set up to operate like a small city.  The researchers are expected to bring their families and there is a school.  Your education there will be far superior to anything you could get in the States—even at a private school.”

Dean uncrossed his arms and stared incredulously at his father.  “Are you suggesting that Sam and I move there with you?!”

“Of course.”

“Forget it!  We have a life here.  Friends.  School is just about to start.  I’m not moving Sam halfway around the world to go to school on some—glorified cruise ship!”

“It’s not a ship—Dean.  You have to move anyway.  You can’t stay in Charlotte.  No one who could be your legal guardian lives here.  And you’re not going to have a legal guardian because you have your father.  And both you and Sam are coming to live with me on CORAL.”

“You can’t make us!”

“Actually, I can, but I would rather it not come to that.  Dean.  Look at this as a once in a lifetime opportunity.  There will be kids there your age and Sam’s age.  You’ll make friends from all over the world.  You’ll have a first rate education.  And you’ll be living somewhere you can snorkel and ride wave runners and go fishing on the weekends.  And when you turn sixteen, you’ll be eligible for SCUBA lessons.”

Dean was drawing breath to continue his argument, but what he said was, “SCUBA?”

“Yes.  I’m not forcing you two to move to Siberia.  CORAL is pretty much in the tropics.  I honestly believe you two will love it.  We’re going to be a family and I know it won’t be immediate and you and Sam still have a lot of grief and pain to work through, but I know we’ll be happy.”

Dean looked into his father’s earnest face and felt all his protests die on his lips.  Hell, moving to CORAL actually did sound exciting.  And it probably would be at first.  But what happened when the novelty wore off and they got homesick?  They weren’t going to have a home to come back to anymore.

“Please, Dean, tell me you won't fight me on this.  Tell me you’ll help get Sam on board with it.”

Dean searched his father’s face and took a long moment to focus on his dark, pleading eyes.  He let some of his anger and resentment slip away.

“Get Sam on board, are you kidding?  That nerd will probably be more excited about it than you are.”

John smiled, his breath coming out in a sigh of mild relief.  He clapped Dean on the shoulder.

“This will be a good thing, son, you’ll see.  This will be good for all of us.”

_Yeah_ , Dean thought.  _We’ll see._  

**Chapter 1**

Dean adjusted his sunglasses as the speed boat went over another turbulent patch of ocean at fifty miles an hour.  It was about eighty-five degrees out and the sun was shining and the boat ride was actually really fun.  However, they had been traveling for about thirty-six hours now.


	5. Destiel AU - Escort Dean

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was supposed to be a regular modern AU of Castiel taking his regular escort to an event--and then somethng would happen--hostage situation or something, and somehow I started writing it as what would the world be like if the Roman Empire hadn't collapsed? It's so convoluted I don't think I can really do anything with it. Ha ha.

“Oh, Christ…Oh, God, yes…oh, yeah, fuck me harder, angel.  Shove it deep.  Make me feel it, yeah…”

Castiel tightened his grip on Dean’s hip and bore down harder on him, shoving the man’s face into the mattress with a hand on the back of his neck.

“Enough,” Castiel ground out, not disrupting his rhythm a wit.  “Not in the mood tonight.”

Dean’s salacious litany cut off immediately.  He turned his head with some difficulty as Castiel still held him down on the bed forcefully.  His cheek mashed against the blue, silky-smooth cotton sheets, his mouth smooshing humorously as Castiel’s forceful movements jostled his head.

“You always pay the extra ten for vocalization.”

“Not tonight.”

Dean went silent and Castiel could tell he was miffed to be out ten denarii, but he was getting two hundred and fifty aureus for the session, so he ought to be happy with that.  Especially since he refused to bareback.  Most people in Castiel’s caste would never even see Dean’s profile since it wouldn’t come up in a database search that filtered out prudes like him.  But Castiel was never one to filter his search results; one could never know what treasures might slip through the cracks otherwise.  And Dean was a treasure.

He was tall.  And broad.  Well muscled.  Three things that were very common among the Hunter caste.  But Dean was fucking gorgeous.  An extreme rarity in his kind.  Most Hunters were scarred and misshapen and to be frank, genetically ugly people.  From his profile, Castiel had gleaned that Dean had become an escort as soon as it had been legal for him to do so at fourteen.  However, even joining at a relatively young age didn’t explain how he’d escaped the hard, disfiguring life of the Hunter caste unscathed.

Beyond that mild curiosity though, Castiel didn’t care, so he’d never asked.  Not that it would have been appropriate for him to do so and neither would Dean have answered.  Their interactions weren’t meant to have words anyway.   Not unless he was paying for it.

Dean let out a small sound and turned his face toward the sheets, his knuckles going white as he gripped the blue fabric.  Castiel’s grin was wild around his panting.  This was why he liked Dean to be quiet sometimes—because sometimes Castiel could actually make him feel good enough to make involuntary noises.  That wasn’t why he’d asked him to be quiet this evening—he was actually quite irritated with an unrelated matter—but knowing that Dean was feeling him now made him pull out and shove at Dean’s hip.

“Back!” he wheezed.  He probably should start exercising again.

Dean understood and flipped onto his back, pulling his legs up and holding the backs of his knees with his hands.  Castiel slid easily back in—Dean was loose from nearly an hour of foreplay and twenty minutes of fucking.  He pushed Dean’s hands away from his knees and put his own there instead, tilting the man’s hips up and angling him just right.

Dean started letting out a keening whine and bit his lip punishingly hard to stop himself—but he couldn’t.  Castiel grunted with lustful ferocity as he fucked the escort hard and fast—triumphant in wringing such desperate sounds out of a man so used to sex he found it boring.  For Saturn’s sake, he even had an erection.

Castiel laughed and let go of one of Dean’s legs so that he could reach down and take his dick in hand.  Large, uncut, unmarked, unbound—how had Dean escaped the barbaric rituals of the Hunter caste?—it filled his hand and moved easily in his fist due to the slippery fluid dribbling from the tip.  Dean cried out and arched his back.  It only took a few more seconds, a dozen or so more strokes of cock and hand and they were both coming.

Dean’s warm come spurted high in the air, falling back onto his body in milky globs.  Castiel’s own release was tempered somewhat by filling the condom rather than the escort, but everything else about Dean made up for the inconvenience.  He continued to rock into Dean’s body even as he softened.

This was his favorite part: moving in Dean’s pliant body.  Dean faked it pretty well most times, but sometimes, like tonight, he actually got the escort off—and he was a puddle of afterglow on the sheets.  Humming wantonly as Castiel continued to fuck gently into him.  Castiel stopped moving, tranquil and calm and still buried in the man’s body.  He leaned forward and put his hands on either side of his head.

“Don’t fret about the ten denarii,” Castiel said, still catching his breath and swallowing around the thirst he had built up.  “I’ll give you twenty.”

Dean opened his eyes and smirked at him.  “Really, Cas?”  And he was the only person below the Celestial caste that had the audacity to nickname him.  “The boyfriend experience?”

“You want it or not?”

Dean looked at him for a moment, and then nodded.  Castiel lowered himself down and kissed Dean’s lips.  Despite their satiation, the kiss was heated, passionate.  Tongues were heavily involved and Castiel was still amazed by the escort’s skill.  He’d kissed a lot of people in his scant twenty-one years and Dean didn’t even have competition for being the best.

Castiel put a hand on his shoulder and rolled them, Dean going with him enthusiastically.  Dean settled down low on his hips so that Castiel’s cock stayed inside him, and took Castiel’s face in his hands as he kissed him senseless.  Truly senseless.  When Dean stopped kissing him he was dazed and disoriented.

“What’s that sound?” Castiel asked, unhappy with the incessant buzzing to his left.

Dean’s warmth left him and Castiel moaned unhappily when his cock slipped out of his body.  The noise stopped shortly after though.

“Timer,” Dean sighed.  Then he flopped back onto the bed next to him.

“You could stay a little longer,” Castiel murmured.

“Not if I want more work.  I’m on Abbadon’s time—and you don’t waste her time.”

Castiel frowned at the mention of Dean’s Madam.  That was the only downside to paying for Dean—he worked for Ephemeral Bliss, the sleaziest escort business in the empire.  Never mind that the woman was a Hellion and therefore born greedy and cruel, she was just downright unpleasant.

“You could find another company,” Castiel suggested.  Again.  “You’re beautiful.”

“No one would take one of Abaddon’s castoffs.  You could pay for another session.”

“I’m too poor for that.”

Dean snorted.  “Well, that’s all fucking relative, isn’t it?”

“I suppose.”  Castiel sighed.  “Can I pay for a negotiation session?”

“That’ll only buy you fifteen minutes.”

“I know.  But, I need it anyway.”

“Why?”

Castiel sat up and pushed himself up so that he could rest against the padded headboard.  He leaned over Dean’s head and dug around in a drawer of his nightstand until he found his _Inebrio_ kit.  He pulled out the slim pipe and filled the small end with a fine, green powder.  Then he ran his fingers over the vials of colorful liquids strapped to the left side of the kit.  He picked a turquoise one and dropped three or four drops onto the powder.  It began to smoke immediately.  Castiel closed the kit and tossed it onto the nightstand.  He sat back and took a long drag on the pipe, holding the fumes in his lungs.  Immediately he felt lighter.

“Those things will kill you,” Dean murmured, his head still down by Castiel’s hip.

“A lot of things can kill me, Dean.  At least this one is enjoyable.”

Dean turned his head, and made a face when he saw the condom still stuck on Castiel’s flaccid penis.  He peeled it off and threw it across the room, grumbling about unsanitary Featherbrains—the offensive term used to refer to Celestials.

“What do you want to negotiate?” Dean asked, wiping his hand on the sheets.

Castiel threaded the fingers of his free hand through Dean’s short hair.  Fucking Hunter caste and their grooming laws.

“Do you ever do the actual escorting part of escorting?”

“With a face like mine?  All the time.”

“Hmm.  I bet you don’t get offers from women.  No woman wants a date prettier than they are.”

“I don’t escort women.  They want dates.  Cover stories.  They want you to plan out how you met and when your first date was.  With men it’s accepted that a friend is just a ‘friend.’”

“Do you service women?”

“Yes.”

“How many—men and women—a week do you sleep with?”

“You’re down to eleven minutes, Cas.”

“I have an event I need to go to next week.  Black tie.  Stags forbidden.”

“Can’t find a date from your own caste?”

“I—accidentally, I might add—humiliated the last woman I was arranged to go to a cousin’s wedding with.  Mother says it would add insult to injury if I were to show up with a woman—or a man—from our own caste at the next public event and our family is already in enough trouble as it is.”

Castiel took another drag from his pipe.

“How did you humiliate her?”

“None of your business, Monkey.”

Dean frowned at the derisive terms used for Hunters.  Either the term wasn’t really offensive to Dean or he knew Castiel used it ironically.  Either way he never got huffy or withdrawn when Castiel used it.

“Okay, so you can’t bring a Featherbrain to your shindig, but you can’t show up alone.  Can you just not show up?”

“Heavenly Minerva, if only common sense were an option.  But, it is Mercuralia, and not going would offend Mercury and the other gods.”

Dean rolled his eyes, but didn’t comment verbally.  Castiel agreed with him, but wouldn’t dare do anything to suggest he did.  He was reasonably confident there weren’t cameras—surveillance cameras anyway—in his private quarters, but the recent resurgence in religious zealotry after the War of Oceana made it a dangerous time to be agnostic or an atheist.  But it was difficult to believe Neptune controlled the seas and the storms and winds when one had had enough science classes to know how weather really worked.

Dean sat up and turned to Castiel with a grin.  “I get to attend a Celestial Mercuralia?”

“If you’re available.”

“I’ll make myself available.  I’ve always wanted to see one!  Will you buy me pretty things, Cas?”

“Nothing prettier than you already are.”

Dean gave him a wry look.

“But, yes, I’ll buy you pretty things.”

Dean’s beatific smile was back and he moved forward to kiss Castiel, knocking the pipe from his hands.

“Hey!  That’s brand new—mm.  Mmmmm…”

Castiel held Dean close and they kissed and let their fingertips trail much too gently over each other for two people in an employer-client relationship.  Too soon it seemed, the timer went off again.  The droning buzz made them both frown.  Dean pulled back.

“What day is the festival?”

“Day _s_ ,” Castiel said.  “It starts on Mercurii and goes through Solis.”

Dean’s eyes widened.  “Five days of Mercuralia?  You Featherbrains are so spoiled.”

“We pay for it,” Castiel said gloomily.

Dean kissed the corner of his mouth.  “I know.”

Dean got off the bed and turned off the buzzer.  He started to hunt around the floor of Castiel’s bedroom for his clothing.  Castiel may or may not have been a little overly excited and flung them about the room like a wild thing.

Castiel watched him slip on the silver undershorts that denoted him as a non-virgin escort, but a high ranking one.  He donned the navel-length, dark green tank top that indicated his caste.  Then he picked up the long swath of sheer, wispy fabric alternating ivory and pale gold and accented with gaudy blood red—Ephemeral Bliss’ colors.  He deftly wound the fabric of his body into the current fashion: a cross between a traditional toga and the retro sari, a design appropriated from some long-ago conquered enemy.

Only priests and priestesses and escorts wore togas outside of holy days anymore.   It was all he ever saw Dean dressed in.  He sat forward and played with his toes as the escort slipped on his soft fabric, but sturdily soled shoes.

“Dean.”

“Yes?”

“You can’t wear that to the festival.  I’ll have to buy you clothes.”

“Okay.  Can you afford to?  On top of five days of my services?”

Castiel grinned.  “Fortunately for me and you my family is willing to pay any sum to minimize their embarrassment.”

“And they won’t be embarrassed by a Hunter as your date?”

“My escort.  No one cares what caste your escort is.  Besides—you’re too beautiful.  No one will even notice the green.”

“I’m flattered,” Dean said flatly, indicating he was anything but.  He picked up the timer and began tapping on the screen.  He sat down next to Castiel on the bed.

“Okay.  So, that’s one two hour session with a premium for peak hours.  Five aureus for arriving clean.  Seventy aureas and fifteen denarii for oral stimulation.  Minus ten denarii for vocalization, but plus twenty for the boyfriend experience.”

Dean looked up and smiled as he leaned forward to peck Castiel on the lips.  “Wish you’d mentioned it sooner.”

“Me too.”

Dean kissed him again and then returned to the timer.  “And…five denarii for a fifteen minute negotiation session.  That brings your total to…three hundred fifty-one aureus and thirteen denarii.”

Dean turned the timer around to face Castiel so that he could see the bill.  He placed his thumb on the small square at the bottom of the screen and it scanned his print and automatically deducted the fee from his account.  The program whirred for a moment, and then a green check mark flashed on the screen.

“Looks like the payment went through.”

“Has it ever not?” Castiel asked, sounding more defensive than he intended to be.

“Not with you, no.  That’s why Abaddon still lets you pay afterwards rather than upfront.”

“How kind of her.”

“Not really.  She knows you add on things during sessions.”

“Like kissing.”

“Like kissing.  Why don’t you just order it up front?”

“I don’t always want it.”

“You have the last—”

Dean cut off and pretended to be occupied with the timer.  He was beautiful, but he was also smart and knew when to shut up.  Though Castiel suspected his dark look had clued the escort in as much as anything.  It was frowned upon for Celestials to kiss anyone outside their caste.  Fuck whatever dirty dog in the streets you wanted, but kissing was personal, intimate.  Something you only did with your own kind.  And oral sex…Castiel had only had the nerve to suck Dean’s cock once.  And it had been glorious, but he’d been so paranoid about getting caught he’d lost his own erection.  But he always ordered oral stimulation upfront now.  The thought of a session without Dean’s lips stretched wide around his cock was unthinkable.

Castiel scratched his head.  When was the last time he had ordered an escort who wasn’t Dean?  It wasn’t uncommon for people to develop favorites and to return to them time and again, but exclusivity was inappropriate.  He should look into getting another girl from Diana’s Blossom; he couldn’t even remember his last virgin.

Dean stood up to leave, but Castiel reached out and took his wrist gently in hand.

“You must tell your Madam that you will also need Martis for this contract.  My servant will greet you downstairs to take you shopping for the proper attire and to get your cleaned up.  Can’t have dirt under your nails.  Or other men.”

Dean smiled.  “I’ll be purer than Venus herself, Cas.”

“Venus isn’t pure—oh.  A joke.  Try not to make those as the festival.”

“As you wish.”

“And Dean, seriously, ixnay on the Ist-chray talk, okay?”

“Just don’t fuck me while we’re there and I won’t.”

“Can’t guarantee you that.”

Dean chuckled.  “See you next week, Cas.”

“Goodbye, Dean.  You can think of me when you’re with your next client if it’ll help you perform better.”

Dean’s snort was loud and dismissive.  Then the hydraulic whoosh of his door sliding shut separated them.  Castiel sighed and lay back in bed.  He reached for his pipe, and then remembered it was on the floor.  He sighed again.

“Television on.”

The panels across from his bed parted to reveal the seventy inch screen imbedded in the wall.  It flickered to life on the last channel he’d left it on—CHN, Celestial Headline News.

“Show bedroom feed.”

The screen switched to a display of eight squares that showed his bedroom from various angles.  He was in most of them, sprawled out naked on his bed.

“Go to feed one hour and…oh…fifty five minutes ago.”

The views didn’t change but now he was watching himself watch Dean undress at the beginning of their session.  It was right before he got impatient and jumped off the bed and started tearing at Dean’s garments.

“Forward three minutes.”

The footage now showed Dean flat on his back on the bed, his arms outstretched like the blasphemous Christ figure so many Lorists worshiped “in secret.”  Castiel knelt with his knees on either side of his head and was fucking his beautiful mouth.

“Camera three.”

The screen filled with the best angle he could get of his cock disappearing down Dean’s throat.  Castiel settled back and wrapped a hand around his half-erect penis.

“Sound up…up…up…”

Dean’s very soft gasping and swallowing sounds filled the room.

Castiel dropped his head back and stroked harder.  Five days.  He was going to have him for five days.  He was going to ruin Winchester, Dean Son of John for other men.  Abaddon would have no choice but to give him to him.

Castiel’s hand flew faster, his left hand moving to pull roughly on a nipple.  His lips parted as his breath quickened.

“Dean…fuck…uhn-mm!”

Castiel drew his knees up quickly as he came, spilling over his fist and down his wrist.  On screen he was displaying much better stamina.  Castiel relaxed back against the pillows.

“Camera five, ten minutes ago.”

The camera switched to show a mostly empty shot with only a part of Dean’s head.

“Back…back, back, back…”

Now Dean was fully in frame.  Bright eyes, sardonic smile.  Castiel knew he was holding out the timer for him to thumbprint off screen.  Castiel turned onto his side and shoved an arm under a pillow before resting his head on it.  He stared at the young man—well, older than him by at least a few years—on the screen.

Winchester, Dean Son of John.  He could be Novus, Dean Gener Zachariah.  Husband to Lord Novus, Castiel Son of Zachariah, first of his name.  Castiel smiled softly.  His family called him a dreamer.  He liked to think of himself as a schemer.


	6. Destiel AU - Pinefest Attempt #1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing slow burn/pining fics, as it turns out, is really hard for me. I made two attempts at finding a story I could work with before I settled on Looking for a Sign. This is the first attempt.
> 
> Oh, warning for John/Mary sex.

*snick*

It was the sound that sealed their fate.

“What did you touch?”

“Nothing.  I—”

The floor disappeared beneath their feet and the pair tumbled head over heels down the steep incline of the trapdoor.  They landed with a hard thud, shoulders and knees taking the brunt, elbows tingling with the unpleasant sensation of the funny bone getting a solid whack.

“Ugh.  Goddamnit, Winchester.”

The man in question groaned pitifully and rolled onto his back.

“I swear to every god in every realm that if the way I die is in a dank hole with you—I will haunt your ghost.  Do you hear me?  I will be a ghost.  And I will haunt _your_ ghost.  For eternity.”

“God, why would you want us to be together for eternity?” John moaned aggrievedly as he sat up holding his left shoulder.  He couldn’t see her in the dark but he knew Mary Campbell’s eyes were narrowed to slits and cutting in his direction.

“Why did you follow me?” Mary snapped as she got to her feet.  She brushed off her backside and listened to the stillness of the room.  It seemed small, with thick walls and a dirt floor.  They appeared to be alone.  For the moment.

“Because.  I wanted to bring you some copper bullets.”

“Vampires need to be decapitated, genius.  I thought you Men of Letters were the ‘smart half’ of this equation.”

“We are,” John grunted and got to his feet.  “Which is why I know you’re not hunting vampires and you need copper bullets.”

Mary rolled her eyes.  “Look, I’ve been hunting my entire damn life.  You joined your little Gentlemen’s Club, what, six months ago?”

“I was inducted nine months ago.  But I’ve been learning lore since I was a child.”

“So have I.  And when you find  group of people who hate the sun and leave big bite marks on the necks of bloodless bodies and fangs at the scene like a damn shark—that’s a vampire.”

“Right.  Unless it’s a mailwe.  They mimic things.  They pretend to be other creatures.  But how you know it’s a mailwe and not what they’re mimicking is by testing the scene with a simple spell to read the atmosphere for their residue.  They leave a heavy trace of—”

Mary snorted.  “Spell work.  _Witchcraft_.  You know, we Hunters kill witches.”

John snorted in return.  “Do you?  You may run a witch out of a town, but you Hunters actually have a terrible track record when it comes to actually eliminating them.”

Mary crossed her arms over her chest and pursed his lips.  He wasn’t wrong, but fuck him if she was going to admit it.  John sighed wearily.

“Look, you can cut their heads off if you want to and they’ll act dead and you’ll leave and then they’ll run off and mimic something else and kill a whole lot of innocent people.  All I’m asking is that while they’re playing dead, you shoot them all in the heart with a copper bullet.  No harm, no foul, right?”

“Yeah, except the no harm part is probably off the table because of you!  We’re trapped like freaking rats and daylight or not I know all that noise woke up the nest.”

“Mailwe have poor hearing.  We’re probably fine.”

“Unless they’re vamps, then we’re in a shitload of trouble.”

“They’re _mailwe_.  I _know_ it.”

“Like I’m going to trust the word of the Men of Letters.  Bunch of elitist assholes.”

“And you Hunters are a bunch of arrogant hotheads!”

Mary gasped sharply.

“What?!  What?!”

She could hear John turning around frantically, waiting for a monster to rip his kidneys out.

“How dare you use that kind of language around a lady,” she continued her mock-offense shtick.

She heard his feet stop shuffling.

“You’re not funny.”

“I’m hilarious,” she retorted.

Something thumped upstairs.  Mary drew her machete from its sheath and was grateful she hadn’t been holding it when they had fallen.  Assuming she wouldn’t have sliced herself up on it on the tumble, she’d have never found it in the dirt floor in the dark.

“Campbell…”

“Shh…”

She put out a hand and her fingers brushed John’s sleeve.  Once he felt the contact he moved to her side like she was a neodymium magnet and he a paltry refrigerator magnet.  She rolled her shoulders to shake him off, but he simply moved his hands from her shoulders to her belt loop and stayed pressed tightly behind her.

It may or may not have reminded her of a dream she may or may not have had that involved John Winchester pressed up to her back in a very different scenario.  Whiny, wimpy Man of Letters or not, even she could admit he was handsome with a surprising set of well-defined abs.

Something in the atmosphere changed.  Mary wasn’t sure what it was, but she was certain that if there were lights in the room, they would have flickered.  She could also sense that they were no longer the only two people in the small space.

“Campbell…” John whispered softly in her hair.

At least he wasn’t completely oblivious and could sense the presence too.  Now if only he would shut the hell up.  Everything was completely still and quiet.  Mary strained her ears to try to determine what direction the—whatever would approach them from.

“Goodness!” said a cheerful voice.  “It’s mighty dark in here!”

Mary turned toward the voice, impeded by John fucking Winchester clinging to her like a baby koala, and raised the machete.  Light filled the space and she flinched away from it.

“There you two are!  Ohhhh!  You’re even cuter in person!  Hello, hello!”

Mary’s eyes struggled to adjust to the light, and they must not be there yet because she thought she saw a grinning, chubby—naked—man taking a few steps toward them.  She blinked her eyes again and saw the chubby, naked man wrap his arms around John and lift him off his feet in a big bear hug.  The guy looked really, really happy to be hugging John.  John didn’t look quite as happy.

“What the—” John sputtered.  “Who the hell—”  He cut off with a soft squawk as the guy hugged him tighter, and then set him down.

Chubby guy looked at Mary.  “You’re so pretty!” he whispered excitedly.  And then she was caught up in a crushing hug.  She still held her machete, but she couldn’t do anything with it.  She was powerless against his onslaught of cheerfulness.  He set her down on the floor and then backed up a few steps.  He put his hands on his love handles as he grinned at them.

Mary looked him over.  White guy, definitely chubby, definitely naked with a little penis tucked up in its foreskin and hanging barely lower than his ball sac.  He just kept smiling at them.  Mary glanced at John.  He had his face angled toward the ceiling, but his eyes seemed to keep peeking down at the guy involuntarily.  She rolled her eyes.

“What’s with the modesty act?” she asked out of the side of her mouth.  “You should be familiar with the equipment.”

“The only equipment I’m familiar with is my own,” he hissed softly.

She snorted in amusement.  “No surprise there, cherry.”

“I am not a virgin,” he said snippily.

“He’s not,” the chubby guy said.  “But neither is she.  Of course in this day and age, that doesn’t really matter anymore.  Never really mattered back then either.  I’ll let you in on a little secret.”  The guy leaned in conspiratorially and stage-whispered, “God has no problem with casual sex or masturbation or oral or anal or any of that kinky stuff you guys get up to.  From what I’ve hear, He’s tried every position Himself.  Just for kicks.”

Mary shook her head.  “What?  Who are you?”

“What are you?” John asked.  “She’s a macho monkey Hunter who stabs first and asks questions later.  If she’s not attacking you, you’ve done something to us.”

“Not at all!  Not yet anyway.”  He giggled.  “But don’t worry.  You’ll like it.  I promise.”

“I doubt it,” Mary said and adjusted her grip on the machete as she widened her feet to a defensive stance.

“Now, that can’t hurt me.  Not in the slightest.  And there’s no need for violence.  I abhor violence.  I only care about love and bringing people together.”  He took a step forward and placed a hand on their shoulders.  “Especially when the two people I bring together are destined for greatness.”  He took a step back and dropped his hands.  “Or at least to _create_ greatness.”  He giggled and blushed.

Mary glanced at her shoulder and then brushed off the tingling feeling his hand had left behind.

“You’re not making any sense,” John said.  “Again, what are you?”

“I’m a cupid!”

Mary made a face.  “A what?”

“Bullshit.”

Mary glanced at John in surprise.  She’d never heard a Winchester curse in all the years her family had dealt with them.

“Angels haven’t walked the earth in two thousand years.”

Angels?  Mary looked at the fat man.  He didn’t look very angelic.

“None from the first or second spheres, no.  And the archangels are too ticked off with each other to care about humans right now.  And as you may have guessed from the political state of the world, the Principalities have been on an extended break.  But we Angels of the Third Sphere, we still do our jobs.  For the most part.”

“Oh, yes?” John asked, his voice sharp and thick with what Mary suspected might be tears.  “Where was my mother’s guardian angel, then?  When she got hit by a drunk driver?”

The man’s cheerfulness faded to empathy.  “I know that was hard for you.  Her angel was there.  She is still alive, isn’t she?”

“She—!”  John sputtered, but then looked away and stayed quiet.

“I don’t get it,” Mary said, “if angels and God are real, why would he even let monsters roam around and hurt and kill people?”

The man—angel?—still looked sad.  “You say that like humans don’t do the same to each other.”

Mary bobbed her head to the side.  He had a point.

“Besides, God made Eve, and Eve made the monsters.  They’re like his grandchildren.  He wouldn’t hurt them.”

“What?”  Mary shook her head.  “Never mind.  I don’t have time for this.  There’s a nest of vamps somewhere in this building and I’ve got to take them out.  I don’t have time for some weird religious nut living in a root cellar like some nudist-enthusiast hermit.”

“Don’t talk to an angel like that,” John admonished.

“Well, if he is an angel, can you help us with the vamps?”

“Oh, no.  No violence.  No siree, not me.”

“Fine.  Then can you help us out of here?”

“I can help you up the way you came.”

“Great.  Let’s go,” she said, walking to stand under the hole in the ceiling which she could now see.

“But you don’t want to go that way.”

Mary looked up at the ceiling and counted to five.  She turned around.

“What way do we want to go then?”

“This way.”

He moved to the side and pointed toward the entrance to small crawl space.  If you follow this, you’ll come up in the room behind them.  If you go in the front door, they’ve got it boody trapped.”

“Booby trapped,” John said.

“That’s what I said: booby trapped.”

“Let’s go.  We’re wasting time.  Winchester, do you even have a weapon on you?”

He raised the gun.

“You’re so useless.  Just stay out of my way and don’t get bitten.”

“You two be careful,” said the cupid.  “Decapitating a mailwe will slow them down, but you’ll need to put copper in their hearts to kill them.”

John gestured a defiant hand at the cupid and gave Mary a scathing look.  “Told you.”

Mary rolled her eyes and grumbled under breath as she made her way to the crawlspace.

“You tell me about mailwes but not about angels.  You Men of Letters are such dicks.”

“We didn’t know there was anything to tell!  We didn’t know they still walked the earth.”

“Well, you’re telling me everything when we get out of here.”

“I’m afraid he won’t remember to tell you anything,” the cupid said.

“What?” Mary asked.

“I didn’t say anything,” John replied.  “Are you sure we should go this way?  How did you even find this in the dark?”

“Stop asking stupid questions.  Just stay behind me and try to be quiet.”

Mary followed the small tunnel and was thankful it never narrowed down to the point where they had to military crawl in the dirt.  She followed the sound of a daytime talk show and tried to ignore how much noise John Winchester was making behind her.

“Jesus, breathe through your nose, will you?” she groused as she pressed ear against the floorboards above them.  John went quiet for about three seconds, and then he gasped in air.

“I can’t!  I’m claustrophobic.  We need to get out of here.”

“If you were really claustrophobic you never would have made it this far,” she said absently as she listened to the sounds of soft snores and deep breathing above her.  “Besides, I figured a mole would be comfortable in dark, underground tunnels.”

John choked back a noise at the use of Hunters’ derogatory term for Men of Letters derived from their acronym.  Mary smiled at his displeasure, but focused on her surroundings.

The windows must be unblocked in the room above because light streamed through the slats and created a dim twilight that allowed her to just make out objects and shapes.  She saw the tunnel branch off to her left.  She followed it and listened to the room above.  It sounded empty.  Mary crawled over to the trap door in the floor, John huffing behind her.  She carefully removed the piece of wood and poked her head up just enough to look around.  She was in a small dark space, but light spilled through the crack made by two folding doors.  It must be a closet.  She pulled herself out and peeked through the crack.  There was a room with dilapidated furniture and trash, but it was empty.  Through a connecting door she could hear the TV set that was in the room with the vamps.  She had the element of surprise on her side.

Mary turned back to John.  “Wait here until I give the all clear.”

“Wait, what?  No!  Mary, wait!”

Mary slipped out of the closet and crossed the treacherous floor as easily and quietly as a jungle cat on the prowl.  She looked inside the room.  Four of them.  Two sleeping together: she could probably get them both in one blow.  Or at least one and a half and that would buy her time to backswing into the third and take his head off as he sat up in the alarm.  The fourth was tangled in a pile of blankets that would slow her down just enough to get over to her and kill her, and then come back and finish the job on the first one.  She didn’t know if a half-decapitated vampire had full strength or half strength, but she was going to have to gamble that it would be enough of a distraction for her to have time to take out the other two.

Mary scanned the room again, looking for exits and other possible weapons.  She couldn’t wait too long though; they were bound to smell her or hear her heartbeat even in sleep.  She tensed her muscles and sprang into the room.  The machete cut through one neck completely, but the blade wasn’t long enough to quite get through two.  She turned and neatly sliced off the head of the vamp just behind her as he sat up in alarm with a powerful blow.  The vamp in the blankets wasn’t as tangled as she had hoped and was across the room in a flash, but Mary easily ducked her wild leap and took off an arm.  While the creature wailed in surprise and pain, she lopped off its head.  She returned to the bed by the door and sawed through the rest of the first vampire’s neck.  All four were easily dispatched.  And without the requisite help of a Man of Letters tagging along.

Mary wiped the blood off her blade with a sheet from one of the beds and was in the process of sheathing it when she was startled by a gunshot.  She turned and saw John lining up a second shot to the heart of another vampire.  He fired.

“I didn’t give the all clear,” she said sourly.

“Would you ever have?” he retorted and shot the third vamp.

“You’re wasting bullets,” Mary complained.  “Expensive copper bullets.”

“Better safe than sorry,” he said as he approached the fourth body.

She finished sheathing her blade and kept any further comments to herself.  John toed the body over and shot it in the heart.  She put her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow when he looked up at her.

“Done?”

“Y—”  His eyes widened and he pointed the gun at her.  “Get down!”

The warning came too late and a fifth vamp tackled her to the floor.  It snarled loudly in her ear, its cool breath thick with the stench of death coursing over her neck.  She struggled to pull her machete from its sheath, but her arms were trapped under her body.

“Mary, move!  I have to shoot it!”

“Get my blade!”

“That won’t kill it!”

“You stupid bastard!  Get my—Ahh!” Mary screamed as she felt teeth puncture her neck.

John let out a wild scream and threw himself bodily at the monster.  He knocked it from its hold on Mary and it turned with a snarl on John.  John scrambled backward, looking for the gun he’d dropped.  Mary pulled her machete and swung at the vamp.  It turned at the last moment and caught the blade with its hand.  Thick silver fluid oozed out of the wound.  Its eyes flashed dark orange and it knocked her away.  The machete slid under a bed.  Mary scrambled after it.  She was halfway under the bed when something grabbed her ankle and dragged her back out.  She screamed as she turned over, brandishing the large knife she kept in her boot.  The monster loomed over her, teeth that were definitely not a vampire’s teeth distorted the human jaw they were set in.  Claws that were definitely not a vampire’s claws broke through the human meatsuit’s fingers as two foot long razors.  It leaned over.  A shot fired.  A hole appeared in the front of the monster’s shirt, followed quickly by dark silver…blood?  The orange of its eyes flickered and dimmed, and then it slumped to the floor in death.

Mary was breathing heavily, her heart pounding futilely at her ribcage in an attempt to escape.  She looked away from the monster—a thing she had never seen before in her life—and saw John sitting on the floor nearly ten feet away.  He had blood on his left temple and his shirt was torn in three places, revealing shallow scratches on his chest.  He was holding his gun in a two handed grip and panting just as hard as she was.  She looked down at the monster.

“I can’t believe you pulled off a heart shot from ten feet away.”

“There’s a gun range in the Bunker.”

“Ah.”

They were quiet for a moment, and then John struggled to his feet.

“Are you okay?”

“Y-yeah…I think so.”

“Mary…”

She looked up.  He’d never called her anything but her surname before.  He crossed the floor and pulled her up into his arms.  His right hand smoothed tenderly over her hair and then cupped her cheek.

“Mary…I thought I’d lost you.”

“J-John…?”

He kissed her and she wasn’t even surprised by it.  She kissed him back.  It wasn’t sweet or celebratory.  It was passionate, desperate.  She wrapped her arms around his neck and moaned in pleasure when he pushed her up against the dirty wall.  His hands were all over her.  She gasped when they found her breasts, her ass, the fly of her jeans was undone in an instant and she ripped his button down shirt open.

Mary hummed appreciatively as she ran her hands down his hard body.  God, he was hot for a bookworm.  They kissed again as his hand plunged inside her panties, his fingers seeking out her warm center.  She squirmed when his finger began to stroke her and kicked off one shoe so that she could get one pants leg off.

John groaned like a man who had found his salvation when his finger sank into her.  “Mn, yes,” he voice was barely a whisper.  “You getting wet for me?”

Mary whimpered in reply.  His fingers were completely slick.  He knew the answer already.  She undid the fly of his jeans and hitched her freed leg up on his hip.  He worked a couple of fingers into her and then a third, warming her up a bit more.  Then he pulled the soaked crotch of her panties aside and pushed his cock inside her.  She was tight from a recent dry spell, but her eagerness allowed her to open up quickly.  He began thrust into her and kissed her again, mimicking their lower bodies with his tongue in her mouth.

It felt incredible.  It felt so right.  Finally being together with John Winchester the way she’d always wanted.  Well, not always.  She definitely found him annoying.  And moody.  And a little controlling.  But maybe she’d just mistaken her blossoming love for irritation.  Isn’t that what all the movies made people believe?  If you hated someone it was just because you were really in love with them?  It made sense she supposed, that he could get under her skin so easily.  It was because she cared about him, right?  She loved him.  Although, she also distinctly remembered really disliking him.

Those thoughts fled from her mind as she chased her orgasm, clutching at John’s broad shoulders.  And thank God John knew how to pleasure a woman because most men didn’t.  Her nails raked down his back.

“Oh, God, yes, yes!  Keep going.  Yes, yes, a little more!  Oh, God!  Oh—”

 

~~~

 

“Yes!  Yes!  Yeeeeeessssssssssss!”

Mary buried her fingers in John’s thick hair and held his face in place even though he didn’t seem inclined to do anything other than roll her clit in his mouth and work two fingers in her pussy.  A second wave of orgasm washed over her and still John persisted.  Such a smart, clever boy.  She tensed—there was three.

“Ohhhhhh.  Oh.  J-John.  Enough, enough!  Too much!”  She let out a slightly embarrassing squeal as a fourth orgasm shivered through her groin like en echo.  She pulled on his hair and he raised his head.  His mouth and chin were gleaming with her juices and he grinned at her.

“You sure you’re done, babe?”

“Yes, yes,” she panted.

John slid up her body, smooth as silk, and slipped his tongue into her mouth.  She tasted herself and didn’t care.  She just spread her legs enough for John to slip his member into her.  It only took a few thrusts and then he came in her, giving her that weird sense of completion she felt every time he did.  He groaned softly and pulled back, eyes closed in ecstasy and he rode out his pleasure in her body.  She brushed the dark sweaty curls off his forehead and he opened his eyes to smile down at her.

“It’s a good thing the Bunker walls are so thick.  Otherwise they might have heard you in the library.”

“Shut up,” she said with a laugh and slapped his shoulder.

He pecked her on the lips and then slid out carefully.  He settled on his side next to her, propping his head up with a hand.  His other hand moved to possessively cup a breast, his thumb playing with the nipple.

“So,” he said, the same way he always started this conversation.  “Are we going to tell anyone yet?”

Her usual answer was one that swore up and down that she wasn’t ashamed of him, but she was worried how their families would react to it.  Hunters and Men of Letters had contentious relationships at best, and the Winchesters and the Campbells had outright hostility for each other for at least three generations.  She wanted to know for sure that their relationship was going somewhere before she kicked that hornet’s nest.  Of course, she’d known John was the one ever since that day in the vamp nest—mailwe nest—three months ago.  She didn’t know how she knew because he still irritated the crap out of her sometimes, but she knew it.  She could feel it.  She hadn’t hesitated to say yes when John had proposed two weeks ago, but still she had been nervous to drop this bomb on her family and the Hunter community in general.  Now though…now there was a new variable.

Mary reached up with a hand and cupped John’s jaw, brushing her thumb over his cheekbone.  “John, I think it’s time we told them.”

“Yeah?” he asked, smile big and bright.

“Yes.  John…”  She paused.  “John, I’m—”

The door to John’s room burst open and banged loudly against the brick wall.  They started up in alarm, John reaching for the covers and Mary reaching for a weapon.  She squawked when she saw her father and John’s father in the doorway.  She abandoned all thoughts of a weapon and yanked the blankets away from John to cover herself.  John grabbed a pillow and put it over his lap.

“See?” Samuel Campbell grumbled, waving hand into the room.  Mary’s mother peeked her head around the corner.  “I told you.”

Deanna looked at her a little in surprise, but not as much as Mary had been expecting.  Henry Winchester had his back to the room and a hand over his eyes.

“Get dressed, Mary,” her father growled.  “We’re leaving.”

“But, Dad—”

“Mary.”  His voice was biting.  Worse was the look on his face.  Not anger or disbelief, but disappointment.  “Get dressed.”

He walked away from the door and Henry Winchester followed quickly after him, keeping his eyes averted.  Deanna nodded to her.

“Listen to your father.”

Then she disappeared down the hall.  Mary’s temper flared.  Listen to her father?  She was twenty-two years old!  Mary threw off the covers and gathered up her clothes.  John scrambled to catch up.  They ran down the hall and saw John’s parents and several other members of the Men of Letters gathered in the main room, watching the Campbells march up the stairs to the exit.

“Dad, stop!”

Samuel turned back and grabbed onto the metal railing, his knuckles going white.  Probably because he didn’t have anything to throw.

“Mary.  No.  We’re leaving right now.”

“I’m adult!  I can do what I want!”

“You still live under my roof!” he thundered.

“Well, not for much longer.”  She entwined her fingers with John’s.  “We’re getting married.”

“Oh for Pete’s sake,” Samuel muttered rolling his eyes like she was a little girl throwing a temper tantrum.

“You can’t be serious,” Henry said, still having trouble looking at Mary.

“We’re very serious,” John said firmly.  “We got engaged two weeks ago.”

“John, honey,” Millie Winchester said as she turned her wheelchair to face them.  “New romances are such a whirlwind.  Sometimes it’s easy to get swept up in the excitement.”

“That’s not it, Mom.  We’re in love.  And it’s not a new romance.”

“How long have you been together?” Deanna asked.

“Three months,” he replied.

All four parents attempted not to roll their eyes.

“Look, it’s not happening,” Samuel said.  “No child of mine is marrying some stuck up desk jockey.  You’re better than these pretentious cowards.”

Several voices murmured with displeasure at the accusation.

“Is that what you really want?” Samuel continued, undeterred by the grumbling of his audience.  “To become one of them?  They’ll tie you down and make you hide with them behind your books.  You’re a Hunter, Mary.  You belong in the field.”

“I can’t do that forever!” Mary shouted.  “I don’t want to.  I want a normal life.  I want a house and a picket fence.”

“People in our line work don’t have normal lives,” Henry said quietly.

Mary glanced at him, her heart feeling heavier than it ever had.

“Then I won’t be in this line of work.  I’ll get out.  I’ll—”

“Mary,” Samuel snapped, the frayed rope of his temper finally breaking.  “You’re being a child!  Get up here.  Your mother and I are taking you home.  And you’re never to step foot in this Bunker or see that mole ever again.”

Samuel started up the stairs again.

“No.”

Samuel turned back.  “What?”  His voice was soft, but dangerous.

“I said no.”  She squeezed John’s hand tightly.  “I’m not a little girl and you can’t tell me where I can go and who I can’t love.  John and I are in love.  And we’re going to get married.”

“Mary, stop being—”

“I’m pregnant!”

The Bunker went silent, except for one man who desperately put his hand over his mouth to cover a bleat of laughter.  Mary stared up at her father, meeting his eyes head on.  He stared back.  The silence stretched out.

“Mary, is that true?” John asked tentatively.

Mary tore her eyes away from her father and looked over at John.  She gazed into his eyes and held both of his hands.  John’s eyes looked a little watery.

“We’re having a baby?” he asked, his voice trembling.

Mary nodded, a smile winning over all the other emotions.

There was a heavy sigh from Henry Winchester behind her.  “Shit.”

 

Chapter 1

 

The Impala growled in the cold Kansas weather; she didn’t appear to be happy to be back in the state either.  Likewise, she also seemed to be displeased to be crawling along the icy, snowy roads at ten miles an hour.  Dean would have satisfied them both by driving at normal speeds, but his mother was in the passenger seat, reading over the morning paper on her tablet.  As he watched the street signs pass by at a slow crawl, he realized he probably would have driven this slowly anyway.  He was not interested in reaching their destination.

“Hey, there’s a diner on that corner over there,” Dean said.  “Wanna stop for some breakfast?”

“They’ll have breakfast at the bunker,” Mary replied evenly.

Dean made a face and took a wrong turn on purpose.  If Mary noticed she didn’t say anything about it.  Twenty minutes later they were outside the circular Men of Letters bunker door, hidden partially under an overpass.  It had been a little over ten years since he’d been inside the Bunker, the last time being when he’d hugged Sammy goodbye and refused to cry until he and his mother were twenty miles down the road.

Of course, he’d seen his brother and father since then.  He saw quite a bit of them.  But Mary never wanted to go back to the Bunker, and he went where she went.  Except during the winter break.  Then Dean had gone to Bobby’s and lived at the salvage yard with his father and brother for three weeks.  Plus another three weeks in the summer.  Six weeks a year for three years and he and his father had fully restored the Impala from the crash that had crumpled up its very frame.  Dean suspected Bobby worked on it some too, but it was something he and his father had done together—something his father had done with him even though John didn’t particularly like cars or getting dirty.  He’d given the title to Dean for his eighteenth birthday.  He also wondered if the gift had been meant to encourage him to come down to the Bunker on his own without his mother.  He’d never done it though.  He thought it would be disloyal.

Dean had grown up in the bunker.  If the stories his grandmothers told were to be believed he’d been born in the bunker, either on the war room table in one version or on the stairs to the garage in the other.  His parents never would confirm or deny either story.  The Bunker had been a cross between a kid’s fantasy play land and a nightmare.  There was so much cool… _stuff_ , and hidden rooms and secret passages.  He just wasn’t allowed to play with any of them.  Not that that had ever stopped him.

As he drove past the door to swing under the hidden entrance that to the garage, his mother told him to park on the street.  Dean protested leaving his car in the ice and salt, but Mary insisted.  Dean grumbled as he swung the car around to park it on the other side knoll.  Hopefully that prevent anyone from skidding on the ice and crashing into it.

They didn’t take out their overnight bags from the trunk.  Mary had informed him that this was going to be a very short trip to pick up a rare artifact, and then they would be on their way.  He didn’t even bother to ask if they would see his father or Sam.  Mary wouldn’t have come if she’d been told John would be present.  If John was gone, then Sam probably was too.  The kid had to be at least fourteen now, and was such a nerd he would follow their father to any dusty library or rare archive.

The icy snow crunched under their feet as they made their way to the door.  Mary knocked and then delivered the password she’d been provided when she had asked the moles for help.  The round door swung open, revealing a middle aged man with a horseshoe balding pattern and a brown waistcoat was that just a touch too snug around the middle.  He beckoned them to come inside while quietly telling them that he was Ganem.  Dean wasn’t sure if that was a first name, last name, or some kind of species, but he followed his mother’s example and greeted him politely.

After Mary explained the reason for her visit, Ganem said that they had been expecting her and would gladly show her to the storage room.  Mary nodded and started to follow him into the labyrinthine hallways.

“Hey, wait,” Dean complained, “what happened to breakfast?”

Mary sighed.  “Do you remember where the kitchen is?”

“Uh…yeah…” he replied, not really remembering at all.

“Go get something to eat.  But stay in the kitchen.  I’ll find you there when I’m done.”

“Okay.”

Mary turned and started walking again.  Ganem pointed around a corner and whispered, “Around that corner, walk until it dead ends.”

“Thanks.”

Dean followed the man’s directions, shrugging out of his heavy leather coat.  He remembered the Bunker being cold, but apparently that was just the emotional atmosphere.  The kitchen looked like a commercial set up—everything was shiny stainless steel with dull, cheap tiling for the floor.  The lack of design may have been because the moles were notoriously cheap (according to his mother) and never upgraded anything.  There was a single person sitting at the counter; his eyes were glued to a tablet as he ate a bowl of cereal.  Dean didn’t bother to greet him as he walked over to the refrigerator and opened it.  To the person’s credit, he didn’t make the “take a picture it’ll last longer” joke until Dean had been standing in the open door for no less than three and a half minutes.

“I just don’t want to cook anything,” Dean gave as an explanation.

“There’s cereal,” the guy said, finally looking up and making eye contact.  He was Dean’s age, cute with dark hair and blue eyes, but he definitely looked like he could use some sun.

Dean made a face.  “I want some meat.”

The guy’s lips twitched in amusement and Dean stared him down—daring him to make the obvious joke.  He looked back down at his tablet instead.

“There’s deli meat and bread.  You can make a sandwich.”

Dean sighed.  “I wanted bacon.  Or sausage.”

“I think there’s some pre-cooked sausage in there.  You can put that in the microwave, unless that’s too much cooking for you.”

Dean was already digging through the drawers in the fridge.  He located the package of sausage and then opened nearly every cabinet in the kitchen until he found the plates.  The guy didn’t offer any guidance as to their location, and Dean didn’t ask.  Once the sausage was getting nuked on a paper-towel lined plate, Dean turned back to look at the guy.

He was wearing black skinny jeans and a fitted dark red T-shirt with black writing too faded to read.  He took another bite of his cereal and from his new placement in the kitchen, Dean saw the runes magically inked around his hand and wrist.

“Bummer.  Prisoner?” he asked.

The guy glanced at him and then at the markings on his skin.  He returned his attention to his tablet.

“It’s voluntary.”

“Voluntary imprisonment?  Are you dangerous?”

The guy gave him a sardonic smile and a mysterious waggle of his eyebrows.  “Very.”

“Yeah, you look it,” Dean said dryly.

“Surely even Hunters know not to let looks deceive them.”

“Yeah…how long you been here?  Is it a new thing?”

The microwave beeped and Dean turned to take out his sausage.

“I’ve been here…nearly two decades.  But not quite.”

“Really?”  Dean crossed to the refrigerator and took out a carton of orange juice.  He carried his sausage and his beverage to the counter and sat on a stool opposite the stranger.  “I lived here when I was kid.  I don’t remember seeing you around.  Did they keep you in the dungeon?”

Dean took a bite of his sausage and then made a face and let the piece in his mouth fall out on to the plate.  He took a swig the cold orange juice and looked up to the find the guy giving him a look.

“Sorry,” Dean said sheepishly.  “It was hot.”

“I looked differently when you were here.  But we’ve met.  We used to play together.”

Dean tilted his head as he looked the man over again.  There were never many children around, but there were usually six or seven living in the bunker at a time.  He remembered two girls and a couple of boys who were much older than he was and wouldn’t play with him.  The only person he’d played with as a kid was—

“Castiel!”

The nephilim smiled.  “Hello, Dean.”

“Holy shit!”  Dean grinned as he looked at his childhood friend.  “This is awesome!  But…why do you look my age?  I thought nephilim aged super-fast.”

“We have the power to.  We can also age like humans.  I chose the latter.”

“Yeah?  How have you been?  I wanted to contact you, but—wait.  Why are you imprisoned?”

“I told you it was voluntary.  I’m not being mistreated.”

“But why?”

“Heaven found out about me.  We’re not exactly…legal? according to Heaven’s laws.  With these markings I’m hidden from them, and they can’t enter the bunker even if they find me.”

“You…you mean trapped here?  Forever?”

Castiel shrugged.  “Until I can figure something out.  I’ve got a lot more time than humans do.  I’m not in any rush.”

“Shit, Cas.”

Castiel smiled at him.  “Don’t worry yourself over my condition.  How has life away from the bunker treated you?”

 

 

Conclusion - I had intended to have them age from 18 to late 20's or 30's being just friends because they both knew Dean would grow old and die and they didn't need to add any extra pain to the relationship.  Then they hit on the idea of cutting Cas' grace out and turning him human so that they can be together.  Things go wrong and they almost kill themselves in the process.  They vow to stay away from each other, but then they notice some odd things like the fact that Dean's not really aging and Castiel can no longer control his aging.  Eventually they figure out that some of Dean's soul got into Cas and some of Cas' grace got into Dean.  So, they're more than human but less than nephilim.  They're not quite sure what that means in terms of lifespan or powers, but they decide they can figure it out together.  I couldn't figure out how to fill the 18-30 gap with a meaningful plot, so that's why I abandoned it.


	7. Destiel AU - Pinefest attempt #2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Writing slow burn/pining fics, as it turns out, is really hard for me. I made two attempts at finding a story I could work with before I settled on Looking for a Sign. This is the second attempt.
> 
> Warnings for mental illness, and bear in mind that there are zero supernatural elements in this universe.

The walls are a different color.

That is Dean’s thought as he drops his backpack on the small X-Ray machine’s conveyer belt and steps through the metal detector.  As one security guard pats him down and the other searches through his bag, he wonders if the walls really are a different color or if he just never noticed that they are a very pale shade of blue as opposed to white.  There’s scuff marks on the wall with the large glass window that houses the security office.  The wall adjacent to the entrance has a dark dent in it from years and years of the automatic door lightly bumping into it when it swings open.  These walls haven’t been painted in a while.

The walls are not a different color, but for some reason, they look different today.

His pat down complete, Dean uses his badge to activate the panel connected to the door.  The keypad lights up with the numbers displayed in a random pattern.  Dean keys in his eight digit pass code and the automatic door swings open with a loud buzzing sound.  The useless knob lightly bumps the wall in the dark dent.  Dean looks at the people on the other side of the glass as he walks through the door; they barely glance at him.  The door shuts behind him and the heavy deadbolt slides into place with an echoing clang.

As Dean walks down the short corridor to the next door, he takes note of the walls.  They are the same pale blue as the outer hall.  The same pale blue, he supposes, that they’ve always been.  At the next door the person behind the glass smiles warmly at him.  He rarely sees Charlie at work; she works the nightshifts.  However, whenever she has a LARP-ing event scheduled for the coming weekend, she’ll get her hours in during the day so she can take off Friday night.  As he activates the panel for the second door, Charlie scribbles something on a piece of paper and then holds it up against the thick glass.

“Handmaiden, the Queen commands your presence for the Battle of Orkaza Valley this weekend!” the note says.

Dean smiles and shakes his head as he keys in his pass code again.  Kansas might just be the flattest place on the planet, so the little gully near Dry Creek has been imagined by dozens of LARP-ers as a great mountainous region of Moondor.  Dean wonders if when the Lawrence City Council designated land for the Woodridge Public Use Area that they imagined epic battles between elves and orcs is what the public was going to use the area for.  Charlie pounds on the glass window, but to Dean’s ears it’s barely a soft thud.  He doesn’t look back at her, but waves a hand.  She’ll come find him at lunch to try to convince him to come with her this weekend.  He thinks he might let her succeed.  It’s been a very long time since he’s been anywhere but work and home.

Dean takes the branching hallway to the right instead of proceeding to the third and final door.  He swipes his badge over the reader at the door at the end of the hall.  It doesn’t require a pass code, it just unlocks when it scans his badge.  Dean enters the employee locker room and hangs his backpack on the hook in the cubby that his name scrawled on a piece of purple tape plastered over at least seven other labels.  He changes into a pair of navy scrubs and swaps out his boots for worn tennis shoes that used to be white but are now a kind of dirty eggshell color.  He pulls his bagged lunch and a small, red velvet drawstring bag out of his backpack and then uses the other exit to enter the employee break room.

Bill Harvelle is sitting at the sloping table reading an actual paper newspaper.  He drops one corner to watch Dean put his lunch in the shared refrigerator—which smells like something has been rotting in it since it was first manufactured in 1987.  The corner flicks back up and hides Bill’s face.

“Morning,” the man says gruffly.

“Morning,” Dean agrees.

He swipes his badge over the scanner and the door unlocks to let him into the facility.  The East Lawrence Psychiatric and Rehabilitation Center.  Dean stops and looks at the walls.

“Huh.  Blue.”

“Good morning, Dean.”

Dean turns and sees the senior physician, Dorothy Baum, approaching him with her focused, no nonsense stride.  She stops directly in front of him, just slightly inside his bubble of personal space, but she does that to everyone.  He’s not certain she knows that she does it.

“Good morning, Dorothy.”

“I’m glad you’re here.  We need a second friendly face to pop in on the stragglers before we have to send in the muscle.  Everyone on the floor gets meds today, no exceptions.”

“Understood.”

“What’s that?” Dorothy asks, looking at the red bag in his hand.

“Oh, it’s a new game.  A card game.  No tiny pieces or anything.  It requires some reasoning skills, so I figured it would be more stimulating than Candy Land and Chutes and Ladders.”

“You’re like one of those people who actually goes above and beyond the call of duty,” Dorothy says.  “I feel like you’re wasted here.  Could be saving the world or something.”

“Um…”

“Oh, we’ve got two new ones since your last shift.  Fourteen and seventeen.  Please pop your head in and introduce yourself before group activities.  You know they react better to group leaders if they think they have a personal connection to them.”

Dean nods.  “Fourteen and seventeen.  Got it.”

“And try to get eleven out of his room, okay?  He doesn’t respond well to muscle.”

“Does anyone?” Dean asks dryly.

Dorothy shrugs and walks away with no more answer than that.  Dean walks into the main room and finds that much fewer than half the patients are present.  A few are in line for their medications, one is at the crafts table coloring with large crayons, and one is staring out the window at the far end of the room.  Dean nods to the one person who bothers to look at him as he passes: Bela, the nurse who is standing in the pharmacy, passing pills in tiny paper cups to patients through the window.  She arches an eyebrow at him, but it doesn’t contain her usual vitriol.  She must have gotten laid last night.

Dean leaves the common room and passes the row of examination and one-on-one therapy rooms.  He follows the L shape of the building to the patient corridor.  It is a very long hallway with twenty rooms lining either side.  The first eight are patients’ rooms, nine and ten are the men’s and women’s bathrooms, and eleven to eighteen are more patients’ room.  The nineteenth and twentieth rooms contain security offices.  A table and chairs are set up between the two rooms against the back wall.  A security guard sits at the table with his back to the wall so that he has a straight view down the corridor.  The patients’ hall is never unmonitored.

Dean starts down the hall and knocks on room one even though the door is wide open.  He peeks his head in and finds it empty.  He crosses the hall to room two, and it is empty as well.  He remembers seeing Anna Milton and Kevin Tran in the main room.  The angel and the prophet of the Lord.  They are usually eager to get up and join the main room every day.  Every day is a new opportunity to spread the gospel to more people.

Door three is shut, but there is light green paper covering the long, narrow window indicating that currently there is no patient residing in the room.  In room four Dean finds his first straggler.  He’s an incredibly skinny and gawky twenty-something named Garth.  He thinks he’s a werewolf.

“Good morning, Garth,” Dean says after knocking on the open door.

Garth looks up from where he is carefully studying a calendar of North American songbirds.  He keeps track of the lunar cycle very carefully.

“Hey, Dean,” Garth says cheerfully.

“So, you know Dr. Baum wants everyone in the main room by 8:30 for meds.”

“I know.  It’s just…the full moon is in two days.  I’m worried it may already be affecting me.”

“I understand.”  Dean pretends to think for a moment.  “How about you go to the main room and take your meds, and then ask Dr. Baum about maybe staying in your room for a couple of days to keep everyone safe?”

Garth brightens—which Dean didn’t think was possible for him to be any brighter—and nods.  “Yeah, I could do that.”

“I can’t promise you she’ll say yes.  You know she doesn’t like it when we isolate ourselves.”

Garth nods.  “I know.  But that’s because she doesn’t believe I turn.  She should stay one night and watch, and then she’ll know.”

“Suggest it to her,” Dean says.

“I will!  I never thought to ask her before.”

Dean smiles and nods.  “Alright.  Sounds like a plan.  But, hey.  Meds first, right?”

Garth nods and stands.  “Thanks, Dean.”  Dean freezes up a bit as the affectionate guy hugs him tightly.  Then Garth walks around the corner to the main room and Dean moves on.

He wonders why Garth needs to be locked up in here.  He’s not dangerous—the extent of his thinking he’s a werewolf means once a month he likes to play with chew toys and pee on potted plants.  He’s technically a voluntary commit, but he did it by giving his family power of attorney over him.  They think he needs to be locked up.

Room five’s door is shut and Dean doesn’t wait for an answer after knocking before opening it.  Paper has been taped over the window to block out the sunlight and a large lump hides under the covers.  Dean walks into the room and picks at the tape on the window until he can peel the black construction paper off.  The lump grunts when light fills the room.

“Come on, Benny,” Dean says.  “You told me vampires can survive daylight.  That the whole bursting into flames thing is a myth.”

“It is.  Don’ mean we like it.”

“Yeah, I’m not much of a morning person myself, but we all have our crosses to bear.”

Benny tosses the covers back to glare at him.  “Is that supposed to be some kind of funny pun?”

“It’s a hilarious pun.  Get up and go take your meds.”

Benny frowns and ducks back under the covers.

“Bela’s on duty today,” Dean mentions casually as he breezes out of the room.  He glances back in and sees Benny getting out of bed and putting on his slippers.  Dean smiles and sees the green paper on room six.  The doors to seven and eight are both open, and Dean knows they are already in the main room.  Gilda Fey, who thinks she’s a magical fairy from another realm, is at the crafts table.  Andy Gallagher is in the medication line, trying to use his Jedi mind tricks to make Bela take the pills for him.  As far as Dean knows, Andy’s mind control powers have been unsuccessful during his three month tenure.

He knocks loudly on the men’s room door and calls out a warning when he opens the door.  He gets no response, but he quickly checks the bathroom and shower stalls—neither of which have doors or curtains—to verify the room is empty.  He does the same on the women’s side.  He takes a deep breath before he knocks on door eleven.  He hears a soft grunt through the small opening, followed by another.  Dean pushes the door open and sees Jake Talley in the middle of a set of pushups on his knuckles.  He’s torn up another pillow to turn the fabric into wraps for his knuckles.  They really ought to just let him have pillow cases again.  Those are easier and cheaper to replace.

“Hey, Jake.  How many reps you up to?”

“Two hundred,” the man grits out and keeps up his work out.

Dean whistles low and long.  “That’s impressive.”

“For a regular human,” he grunts out with the effort of keeping up the exercise.

Jake thinks he has superpowers.  He nearly got himself killed and a whole lot of people hurt when he stepped in front of a bus to stop it with his bare hands.

“Dr. Baum wants you to go to the main room and take your meds by 8:30.”

“Dr. Baum,” Jake huffs with exertion, “can go to hell.”

Dean hums noncommittally.  “Well, you know I’m friendly face number two, which means the muscle will be next to visit you.”

Jake stops the pushups and glares at Dean.

“Hey, man, I appreciate that you restrain yourself and let them think they can actually move you, but you did wind up hurting Dr. Mills last time.”

Jake drops his eyes, looking ashamed.

“Part of having that power is being responsible with it, right?”

“I don’t belong here,” Jake mumbles.

Dean doesn’t respond to that.  “Just come on out and take the meds.  You know your metabolism will burn it right up.  No sense in putting innocent people in danger, right?”

Dean waits while Jake thinks.  Finally, he nods and sits back on his heels.  He starts to unwrap his knuckles.

“Okay.  I’ll go.”

“Thank you, Jake.”

The man grunts and Dean leaves him alone.  Across the hall the door to room twelve is shut, but he knows it’s empty.  He had seen Madison Goldman looking out the window in the common room.  She is their other werewolf—and Dean doesn’t think she should be here either.  But not because she’s harmless.  She’d scratched up and bit two people during one of her “shifts” and damaged someone’s eye enough that he’d gone partially blind.  She should be in the West Lawrence Psychiatric Center for the Criminally Insane.  However, the court had determined that her behavior was the result of her addiction to Demon Blood and all she needed was a stint in rehab and some therapy.  Dean disagrees, but he isn’t a psychiatrist so no one gives two shits about his opinion.  He opens the door so that the room is visible from the hallway.

Room thirteen is kept permanently empty, for obvious reasons, and the green paper has been removed from the window on door number fourteen.  It’s still cracked open from when the first orderly stuck his or her head in to wake up all the patients.  He knocks lightly and calls out a greeting.

“You may enter,” a gravelly voice responds.

Dean cocks an eyebrow as he pushes open the door.  The voice is rough, but not in the same wrecked way that those people who tried to smoke Demon Blood ruined their voices.  Inside the room the twin bed is neatly made with hospital corners.  A man sits at the desk, which is bolted to the floor, in the chair that can move only a few inches along the track anchoring it to the floor.  His back is very straight and one hand and forearm are resting on top of the desk.  His body is partially facing the door so he can look at Dean without moving his head too much.  His eyes are immediately focused on Dean when he enters the room.  His really pretty blue eyes.

Dean is aware that some of the patients at the facility are good looking, but he doesn’t really associate it with them in a meaningful way.  He’s always too busy watching them for signs that they may have an episode to pay attention to the superficial trappings.  He doesn’t know what warning signs to look for in Fourteen yet, so what he sees is an attractive man with a light beard, bright but cautious eyes, and lips that remind Dean he hasn’t even kissed anybody in close to a year.  He closes his eyes for a moment and refocuses on where he is.

_Psychiatric hospital, dipshit.  Don’t be the creepy orderly who gets hot for the patients._

Dean opens his eyes and smiles.  “Hi.  I’m Dean.  I’m—”

“An orderly,” the man replies, his voice still deep and gruff.

“Uh, yeah, kind of.  I’m certified, but I’m actually more like the activities coordinator.  Kind of like the cruise director who gets overly excitedly about the prospect of shuffleboard and karaoke night.”

The man frowns.  “I’ve never been on a cruise.”

“Yeah…”  Dean flicks his eyes over the guy.  He hasn’t moved other than to speak.  “Neither have I.  Anyway, what’s your name?”

The man narrows his eyes and looks Dean over.  Dean lets him.  Most of the patients like to size up the staff.

“Castiel,” he says at length.

“Castiel, huh?”  Dean chuckles.  “Is that your stripper name?”

The fingers resting on the desk strum once.  Dean’s eyes cut over to them and back to Castiel’s face.

“No,” he says.

Dean clears his throat awkwardly.  “Well, since you’re new here, you might not be aware that everyone is required to take their meds by 8:30.  First knock is at 8:00.  Second friendly knock is at 8:15.  The muscle comes at 8:25.  You don’t want the muscle to come.”

Castiel nods.  “Do I take my medicine here?”

“No, you go back to the main room and up to the window with the nurse.  It says ‘Pharmacy’ above the window.”

“How do I get there?”

Dean pushes his lips out in confusion.  “Did you not get the tour when you arrived?”

“If it happened, I was unaware of it.”

“Oh.  Well.”  It isn’t hard to tell the guy to walk down the hall and hang a left, but since he is new he probably feels very uncertain of himself and possibly afraid.  Dean doesn’t know why he is here or if it is by choice or court ordered or if his family just abandoned him here.  “I have a few more rooms to check, but I’ll come back before 8:25 and show you to the main room myself.  Would you like that?”

Castiel gives him a curt nod.  His eyes fall to the bag dangling from Dean’s fingers by the drawstring.

“What is that?”

Dean looks down, and then holds up the bag.  “This?  It’s a game.  It’s called Love Letters.  Everyone is dealt a card and all the cards have an action they can perform.  Like, guessing what cards the other players hold or the ability to swap cards or protection for others using that card on them.  Everyone takes turns drawing one card and discarding one until the end of the round.  The goal is to have the highest ranked card at the end of the round.  If you do, you get a point.  After a few rounds, whoever has the most points wins the game.”

“What does that have to do with love letters?”

“Well, everyone is trying to get a love letter to the princess by holding onto the card with the highest value.”

Castiel’s face is passive to the point of blankness.  Dean stares at him a moment, not sure if the guy suddenly zoned out on him.

“Uh, would you like to play?  I mean later.  After meds.”

Castiel nods.  “I would like to converse with you again.  If the game is the means by which to do that, I will play it with you.”

Dean opens his mouth and closes it.  “We can, uh…we can always just talk if you want to.”

“Is that considered one of the activities you organize?”

Dean huffs out a laugh.  “Generally, no.  You guys have usually talked yourselves out with the docs by the time you’re ready for activities.”

“I will save some of my talk for you.”

Dean smiles.  “Well, geez, Cas, thanks.  You know how to make a guy feel special.”

Castiel’s eyes suddenly gain an intense focus and zero in on Dean.  “Are you referring to sex?”

“N-no.  No, no.”

“Oh.”  Castiel looks away.  “You should continue your rounds.  I will wait for you, but I don’t want to see the ‘muscle.’”

“Oh, right.”  Dean checks his wrist for his watch out of habit, but it’s back in the locker room.  They’re not allowed to wear jewelry on duty.  “Don’t worry; I’ll be back before they get here.”

Dean turns to leave but Castiel stops him by saying his name.  Dean looks back.

“What is your stripper name?”

Dean laughs.  “Uh…”  He never had a pet, but he does have a car.  “Baby.  Baby Holiday.”

Castiel’s lips quirk at the corners.  “That’s a nice name.”

Dean rolls his eyes, but he’s smiling.  “Thanks, Cas.”

Dean crosses the hall at a diagonal to get to room fifteen.  He sobers when he sees Alex Jones sitting on her bed in her underwear.  Alex is diagnosed with histrionic personality disorder.  It’s severe enough that her attention seeking behavior has made her delusional.  She claims that she is a lure for a nest of monsters and often uses sex as the lure.  The truly sad thing is that she’s barely eighteen.  She came to the ELPRC after she aged out of the juvenile facility.  She’s been institutionalized since she was fourteen years old.  She’s manipulative and dangerous to other people, and yet at the same time—many men had taken advantage of her when she’d been a little girl and thought that sex would let her control them.  Her eyes cut over to him when he enters the room.

“Dean.”  She arches her back and the long lines of her pale white body are put on display.  The unflattering hospital undergarments do nothing to hide the fact that she is shapely and voluptuous.

“Where are your clothes, Alex?”

“The alpha wants to see you.”

“Does he?”

“He wants you.”

“Well, tell him to get in line.  Where are your clothes?”

Dean looks around the room and sees her soft hospital shirt and pants balled up behind the pillow on her bed.  He pulls out the shirt and Alex puts her arms over her head without being asked.  She doesn’t fight him as he dresses her and willingly steps into the pants when he crouches down and holds them open by her feet.  Alex’s hand ghosts along his jaw and he pulls away.  He nudges her slippers over to her feet.

“Main room.  Meds,” Dean says as he walks out the door.

He comes to an abrupt halt in front of room sixteen.  The door is wide open and the sun is shining brightly through the window because this side of the building faces east.  The current occupant, Fergus McLeod, is in the main room for which Dean is grateful.  Dean doesn’t like Fergus.  He insists on being called Crowley after the Satanist and thinks he’s some kind of demon.  Or the king of demons or something.  Every week it seems like Crowley is either losing or gaining hierarchal power.

He’s not a fan of Crowley, but the guy is mostly harmless and not the reason why room sixteen makes Dean’s guts twist up inside him.  Room sixteen was Sam’s room.

When Sam hadn’t gotten into law school, he’d fallen into a bit of a funk.  At least, that’s what his parents called it.  It was probably clinical depression, but everyone, including Dean, had just told him he could retake the LSAT’s and try again.  Or find a new passion.  Get a job.  Stop moping.  Be responsible.  He’d been easy prey for a drug lure.  Her name had been Ruby and she hadn’t just gotten Sam on the line, she’d reeled him in and gutted him.

Demon Blood.

In an effort to avoid chemical composition testing, a synthetic version of heroin had been manufactured by the American branch of a Colombian cartel.  The stuff can be smoked, snorted, and shot directly into the veins, and is more like a cross between LSD and PCP than heroin.  The users always had vibrantly realistic delusions and when those delusions inevitably turned threatening, the addicts lashed out with drug-enhanced rage and strength making them incredibly dangerous.  Worst of all, after repeated use, the delusions seemed to burn themselves into the users’ brains and they began to lose the ability to separate reality from the drug high.  That’s why there are so many werewolves and vampires and demons and monsters at the ELPRC.  Of course, not all of them are here due to drug use.  Anna, Kevin, and Alex had never touched the stuff.  Based on the lucidity of his comments, the new guy, Castiel, probably wasn’t a product of Demon Blood either.

Sam though…Sam had thought he was the actual devil.  He’d been convinced that he had to kill himself to save the world.  Dean had managed to talk him down from the edge of a well and he’d been placed into the ELPRC the same afternoon.

The withdrawal from Demon Blood isn’t violent or painful like it is for heroin.  But it is incredibly slow, and sometimes people never seem to be able to quite shake the sensation that their delusions are real.  Sam had spent a year and a half at the ELPRC.  Dean had visited him every day in the beginning, and then once a week when his parents had told him he couldn’t stop living his life for Sam’s sake.  Dean hadn’t thought there was much sense in worrying about his job performing oil change after oil change at a Jiffy Lube or his string of one night stands, but he’d always done what his father asked of him, especially if he thought it would make his mother happy.

Even still he had become a fixture at the ELPRC.  He would play board games with Sam or play him songs on the guitar.  He couldn’t sing worth a damn, but he could find the melody for all of his favorite songs and most of the indie-folk crap Sam had favored before he’d been consumed by his addiction.  Other patients would gravitate toward them and ask to play with them or listen to Dean play guitar.  He hadn’t minded and the staff had loved him for giving the other patients something to look forward to.  Something outside of their delusions to focus on.  They’d offered him a part time job to come more than one day a week.  Dean would have done it for free, but now he had a legitimate reason to present to his parents for being there so often.

When Sam had been declared “recovered” and “ready to reintegrate into society,” the facility had offered Dean a full time job with benefits so that he wouldn’t quit when Sam left.  He’d been worried about not being around for Sam if he was at work, but he did need an income and Sam was going to have to spend at least a year at their parents’ house as part of his release stipulations.  Dean had taken the job and entertained the patients as best he could while worrying about Sam.

After a year, Sam had moved in with Dean and gotten a job at a Gas ‘n Sip.  He only worked a few hours during the day and attended community college at night.  School was the last thing he really remembered about his life before everything got all jumbled up, so he wanted to reorient himself by going back to what was familiar.  Their parents helped with finances where they could, but Dean had accepted the facility’s offer to pay to put him through night school to be certified as an orderly, which included a pay increase.  They wanted him to do the same work he had always been doing, but now he could legally step in and help restrain patients when necessary.

He never would have pictured himself in this line of work, but after seeing what the Demon Blood drug had done to Sam, he couldn’t imagine doing anything else other than helping people who had fallen victim to it.

Sam had finished community college and become a vet technician at a local veterinary practice.  He still lives with Dean even though he makes enough to have a place of his own.  Six and a half years after he’d stopped using, five years after being declared “well” again, and Sam still has moments when he has to rub a painful friction burn into his palm and reassure himself that whatever it is he’s seeing or hearing isn’t real.  He isn’t ready to be on his own—he may never be—but Dean has accepted that responsibility.

His parents aren’t happy with him.  He doesn’t have any friends.  He hasn’t had a relationship outside of onetime trips to some girl’s apartment or a rushed release in the bathroom stall of a gay bar.  He has a career—but it involves surrounding himself with more people who are sick like Sam.  He deals with it at work, he deals with it at home, and he has no respite.  His mother says she just wants him to be happy.  She doesn’t believe him when he says he is.  He doesn’t blame her; he doesn’t believe himself.

Room sixteen.  He’d seen Sam ranting and raving like a true lunatic in this room.  He’d been scared of him at one point.  He’d been scared when Sam had woken him up in the middle of the night to tell him about the hidden messages in the walls after he was supposedly better.  Dean still sleeps with his door locked and he feels guilty as hell about it.

Dean frowns at the room.  Maybe he _should_ change jobs.  Sam is enough of a reminder without being in this place day in and day out and seeing more sick people.  But, he actually likes the work.  He doesn’t trust the brain shrinking doctors to be everything the patients need.  They need someone who’s not there to evaluate them or study them.  They need someone to treat them normally.  To treat them like they’re still people.  He’s seen quite a few people recover and go home.  He’s happy the number who come back is very, very low.  He realizes that room sixteen petrifies him because he’s worried Sam might need to come back.  It’s unlikely after so many years—he hasn’t even spoken of the devil in six months—but the doubt is always there in Dean’s mind.

Dean turns from the room, happy he doesn’t need to go inside, and looks for room seventeen’s occupant, the other new patient.  Dean knocks on the open door and finds a man in his early forties lying prone on the bed with an arm slung over his eyes.

“Hello?” Dean says cautiously.

“Go away,” the man moans softly.  “The hunger is increasing.”

“What hunger?  They’re serving breakfast at 8:45; after everyone, including you, takes their meds.”

“Not that hunger.  Hunger for human flesh.  Once I taste it—I’ll be changed.  There’ll be no going back.”

Dean quirks an eyebrow.  He’s never met a cannibal before.

“So, you haven’t eaten anyone yet?”

“No.  But it’s only a matter of time.”

Dean frowns.  This guy seems to be too dangerous to be allowed to roam free in the ward.  But then, if he hasn’t actually hurt anybody or made a specific threat, he hasn’t done anything worthy of being locked up.  Even if any reasonable person would guess this guy is probably going to snap at some point.

“Well, in the meantime, my name’s Dean.”

The man moves his arm and looks Dean over.  “You look delicious.”

“Not the first time someone’s said that to me,” Dean replied with a bawdy wink.

The man blinks and then snorts.  However, Dean’s cockiness seems to have shaken him from his funk.  He sits up and grips the edge of the thin mattress with his hands.

“I’m Jack Montgomery.”

“Nice to meet you, Jack.  You have anything you’re particularly interested in?  That can be done indoors?”

“Are we going to be trapped inside all the time?”

“No.  We go out Mondays and Wednesdays to the courtyard.  And if you’ve earned enough brownie points by Friday, you can go on the field trips to the dollar store.”

Jack makes an expression that shows exactly how wowed he is by that prospect.  “I like to read,” he says.

“There’s a decent selection of books in the facility library.”

Jack nods his head, and then shakes it and shuts his eyes tightly.  “Fuck,” he forces out harshly though gritted teeth.  “I’m so hungry.”

“You should go take your medicine,” Dean says nonchalantly.  “It’ll probably take the edge off.”

Jack shakes his head.  “It won’t.  It _won’t_.  Nothing will but the taste of human flesh.”

“Well.  It can’t hurt to try, right?”

Jack looks up at him.  The reasonableness of Dean’s statement seems to strike a chord in him.  He nods his head again.

“Okay.”

“Great.  Go to the main room—you know where it is?—and take your meds and have some breakfast.  Rufus makes the good stuff, man.  No hospital crap here, I promise.  And then see how you feel.”

Jack nods again, and Dean figures he’s done enough.  If he hasn’t, let the muscle deal with getting bit first thing on a Thursday morning.

Dean smiles as he approaches the last room.  His favorite patient is in room eighteen.  Ronald Reznick, paranoid schizophrenic.  He’s always going on about the secret government conspiracy to take over the world with shapeshifters with laser eyes.  Listening to him is better than TV sometimes.  He’s also funny and just genuinely a nice guy.  He could probably be on the outside with some outpatient monitoring, but he got in some trouble at a bank when he tried to hunt one of the shapeshifters inside it.  He’d barely avoided an attempted armed robbery charge.  The compromise is a stint in the ELPRC.

“Yo, Ron, why are you in here and not getting your meds?  I can usually count on you, buddy.”

Ronald looks up from the scribbling on his desk.  The patients aren’t allowed to have pencils or pens, so his notes look even crazier done in brightly colored crayon.  He shakes his head and his wild puff of frizzy orange hair bounces around.

“Not on Thursdays anymore.  Didn’t you see the report?  You were playing that song by the people who like car doors.”

“What?”

“The Car Doors.”

“Do you mean The Doors?  Or The Cars?”

Ronald shrugged.  “Doesn’t matter.  You were distracted.  They all were.  No one saw the report but me because they were focused on…”  He trails off and narrows his eyes suspiciously.  “Everyone was looking at you play your hypno-music.”

Dean sighs quietly.  Ron’s having a bad day; Dean can already tell.  He’s learned to pick his battles.

“Go to the main room and take your meds, Ronald, or the muscle will come for you.”

“Oh, I just bet it will!” Ron yells at his back as he leaves the room.

The security guard looks up as Dean enters the hallway.  He raises his eyebrows in question, but Dean shakes his head.  Ron won’t leave his room now that he’s convinced the facility has been infiltrated.  Dean has no choice but to report him to the muscle.  He pokes his head in room fourteen and sees that Castiel is sitting in the same place and in the same position he left him in.

“Hey, Cas.”

“Hello, Dean.”

“Ready for that tour?”

Castiel nods and stands.  He looks down in confusion and tilts up one foot to examine the slipper on it.

“Where are my shoes?”

“The facility’s going to hold onto them for awhile.  The slippers are more comfortable.”

“Safer,” Castiel correctly translates.

Dean shrugs. He turns to lead Castiel out of the room, but a hand lightly grasps his shoulder and turns him back around.  Dean sucks in a breath as he comes toe to toe with the man, their faces inches apart.

“C-Cas?  What are you—”

“I like your eyes, Dean.  They’re a pretty color.”

“Th-thank you?”

“And I can see your soul in them.  You’re beautiful.”

Dean stares into Castiel’s eyes in shock and swallows with some difficulty.  Then he pulls himself together and gently shakes Castiel off with a laugh.

“Dude.  Hitting on me is not the way to get extra Jell-O, okay?”

Dean takes a step back and feels the pressure in his chest ease.  He puts more space between them.

“Let’s go, Casanova,” he smirks, enjoying his pun, and heads into the hallway.

Castiel walks beside him and appears to be back to his blank-faced default.  Dean points out the bathroom door.

“That’s the men’s room.  You can shower and use the toilet on your own, but shaving and teeth brushing have to be supervised.  You could probably use a shave soon, huh?  Get rid of that peach fuzz.”

Dean gently touches the back of his finger to Castiel’s cheek, and then whips his hand back to his side.  What the fuck is he doing?  He hooks a thumb over shoulder.

“Back there are the security offices.  It’s not really security so much as orderlies, but they’re there in case…well in case they’re needed.  Around this corner are the doctors’ offices.  The right side is for physical examinations and the left is for the talk-about-your-feelings stuff.  And right here, is the main room.

“There’s a table where you can do some arts and crafts.  There’s the ‘library’ over there,” he indicates the three overstuffed bookcases with sagging shelves.  “Television can only be watched during television hours, and only if everyone can agree on a channel.  Over there are some board and card games.  That door leads down to the courtyard.  If the weather is nice on Mondays and Wednesdays, we spend a few hours outside.  There’s a basketball hoop and a soccer ball and a garden.”

“A garden?’ Castiel asks, giving the first sign that he was paying attention at all.

“Yeah.  There’s a small vegetable section and then a larger one for flowers.  Of course this time of year there’s not much going on.”

“Maybe not above ground, but there’s a lot of work to do to prepare a garden for growth.”

“Well, it’s all yours then.  No one else really bothers with it.”

“Will you show me the garden next Monday, Dean?  Weather permitting, of course.”

Dean smiles at Castiel’s serious, but earnest expression.  “Of course.”

“Thank you.”

“No problem.”

They stare at each other for a moment and then Dean shakes himself and clears his throat.

“Over there,” Dean says, “is the pharmacy.  You go up there every morning and a nurse will give you your medicine.  Just show them your bracelet.”

Castiel looks down at his left wrist and twists the plastic band with his right hand.  He nods and moves to join the growing line without speaking again.  Dean inhales deeply and leans against the wall where the main room meets the doctors’ corridors.  He begins to exhale and chokes on the air when Dorothy startles him from behind.

“Met the two new guys?” she asks.

Dean discreetly puts his hand to his chest and can feel his heart slowing down from its sudden jumpstart.

“Yeah, I met them.  Jack the Cannibal.  Demon Blood?”

“Yep.”

“Do you think he’s dangerous?”

Dorothy hums and makes an uncertain face.  “I don’t know yet.  We’re going to keep an orderly on him ‘round the clock for the first couple weeks until we can determine how strong the grip of delusion is on him.”

Dean nods.

“What about fourteen?” she asks.

“He’s a little odd,” Dean says with a chuckle.  “But then, he’s not as odd as some people I run into at the Gas N Sip at two in the morning.”

Dorothy smiles.

“I like Cas.  It seems like he’s just a little disconnected.  He’s not a Demon Blood addict, is he?”

“No, he’s not.”  Dorothy tilts her head and looks at Dean curiously.  “What did you call him?”

“Uh, Cas?  He didn’t seem to mind the nickname.  Is it a problem?”

Dorothy is still looking at him with a probing expression.  “You met Castiel?”

Dean’s eyes cut left and then back again.  “Uh, yeah,” he says.  “Fourteen.  Dude over there in line.”

“Hmm.”

“’Hmm,’ what?”

“Castiel is not a patient here, Dean.”

Dean’s brow creases.  “What do you mean?”

“That man over there—his name is Jimmy Novak.  He suffers from Dissociative Identity Disorder.”

Dean thinks hard as he tries to dredge up what that disorder entails.

“DI Disorder is the new, more apt term for Multiple Personality Disorder,” Dorothy explains.

Dean’s eyebrows shoot up and he looks over at Castiel—Jimmy.

“I had no idea,” he murmurs.  “Are they very different?”

“I don’t know.  I’ve only met Jimmy.  He’s here voluntarily because his wife threatened to leave him if ‘Castiel’ doesn’t go away.”

Dean feels a pang of pity for Castiel.  He seems very much like a real person; it seems unfair that he has to “go away” because people say he shouldn’t exist.

“Is he faking it?” Dean asks.

“It’s possible, though unlikely based on the history and anecdotes from his family, friends, and coworkers.  We’re going to run some tests though and talk to him while he’s in an MRI machine.  His mouth can lie, but his brain can’t.”

Dean watches Castiel—Jimmy—take a paper cup from Bela and then swallow down some pills with a sip of water from a plastic cup.  He opens his mouth and lifts his tongue for Bela to peek inside.

“What do you use to treat…his condition?” Dean asks.

“For now he’s getting placebo pills.  It’s possible if his brain thinks it taking something to make Castiel go away, it will do it on its own.  Once we know more about his blood chemistry and the situation, we’ll look into some other options.”

Dean nods again.  Well, this is definitely new.

 

 

 

Conclusion: Of course despite his best efforts, Dean gets to know Castiel more than Jimmy and they fall in love.  But, he can't do anything because he knows it is wrong on a lot of levels.  Eventually Cas decides that if he can't be with Dean, then he doesn't want to _be_.  So, Jimmy emerges and has no relapses.  He goes home.  One day Dean is asked at work if he would feel comfortable meeting with the recovered Jimmy; the man wants to thank him.  Dean doesn't want to see a stranger wearing Cas' face, but he doesn't want to hurt Jimmy's feelings.  He agrees to a supervised visit and someone from work brings Jimmy to his apartment so that they can have a chat.  It's not as bad as Dean thought it would be.  He's glad he managed to help Jimmy.  However, as they're leaving, Jimmy says something that is innocuous to the worker, but Dean knows it means Cas is actually in control.  They leave, but once the worker drops him back off at his car, Cas drives back and knocks on Dean's door.  They have a long discussion about what is going on.  Cas says Jimmy ceded the body to him because he was tired of living, which was why Cas was created in the first place: he was the "angel" that stopped Jimmy from killing himself.  Jimmy said it wouldn't be fair to commit suicide because Cas was still alive.  Dean doesn't know what to do.  Cas tells him that he's going to leave Jimmy's family because he doesn't belong there; he doesn't know them.  Dean feels guilty, but if Cas is in control, there's not much they can do but lock him up--but then that would only be if he was a danger to anyone.  Divorce and leaving broken hearts isn't a danger, although mentioning suicide is probably enough that Dean could get him involuntarily committed.  But he wouldn't do that.  Can't.  But he can't run off with Cas either because he can't leave Sam.  He can't be with Cas because everyone who knows how they met would blame him or treat him like some perverted criminal.   <\----and I couldn't work out a happy ending for this one, so...abandoned!


End file.
